One

 I live on the southern border of Center City Philadelphia, on the south side of South Street, so that if I am looking out of my living room window the whole of Center City is in front of me and South Philadelphia is at my back.

The southern border of Center City is South Street, the northern border is the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.  The eastern and western borders are natural, set by the Delaware and Schuykill rivers.  Across the Schuykill to the west is University City; to the east across the Delaware is New Jersey.

These borders are pretty firm in my mind, though I suppose there is nothing official about them and so nothing backing them up but my own intuitions.

I have my roots here.  I am not aware of any intermediary on either side of my family between Philadelphia and Ireland, the country my ancestors left.  My mother and father both came from Southwest Philadelphia, where they referred to their neighborhoods as parishes.  My father came from MBS (Most Blessed Sacrament) and my mother from St. Francis de Sales.  But my father's family, at least on his mother's side, were from South Philadelphia, which at one time was largely Irish.  As a child on New Year's Eve he would stay at his grandmother's house at 15th and Porter near South Broad to see the parade the next day.

When my mother was eighteen she moved with her mother and father, her two sisters, and her little brother from a three bedroom house on Florence Ave. in Philadelphia to a three bedroom house in the suburb of Drexel Hill.  My parents both told stories of their youths in the city.  They had both been poor, though I think my mother was unaware of it, while the poverty of my father's family was public knowledge.

I believe that my father's parents remained in the city on Springfield Ave. until about 1970, since I remember visiting them there as a young child, by which time he and my mother were married and had the house in which I was born in Lansdowne, Delaware County.  It was not a bad place to grow up.  If I try to return to the way it looked during the earliest time of my childhood it has the glow that a child's perceptions give to everything.  It is just that the place, and my early life, I cannot separate from the pallor given to it in my memory by a troubled and dysfunctional adolescence.

Because of the intellectual quality of my parents, because there were books in the house, and my mother was involved in leftist causes like Cesar Chavez's Farmworker's Union and the nuclear freeze, and because my father had been a college philosophy teacher, I felt, in our suburban community, like a kind of alienated aristocrat.  Looking back on it, a pattern was set for me, psycho-socially if you wish, very early on.  In some ways this was an obvious advantage, and is responsible for what is best in me, and in others this sense of assumed superority was a trap.  My family was not really superior or unique, even within that tiny suburban community, and neither was I.

I only know about my ancestors some of their names--Touey, McLaughlin, Carlin, Mount--and that they were Irish and poor and that they were city people, people of this city.  It is hard for me to extrapolate from the relatives I have actually known to the ones who picked up and left their homes for a foreign country.  They came to Philadelphia and they stayed, perhaps only because they could survive here, which is all they did for many a generation.  It was only after WWII that they began to have larger aspirations.

There was a great lifting-up in America that occurred with my parents' generation.  Something as simple as raising a family in a house where every child had their own bed was a real change.  My parents lived in a material comfort that was much greater than anything they had known in their youths, and they lived in a culture, too, that they knew had advanced and liberated them from the narrow world they had grown up in.  But in everything they said about that world there was a tinge of loss.  It was hard sharing your bed with your sister or a couple of little brothers, it was hard being disciplined by the nuns or having to get up on a winter morning to serve Mass as an altar boy.  But there was a quality of experience in all of that that they could see had a value that was gone forever.

"Gone forever."  Everything when it's gone is gone forever.