So I returned to the Lehigh Valley this past weekend to attend the performance of Evita and the specialty dinner at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. I'm on their board. It made sense I would go. This was the first time I've been back since leaving last year, and I was wondering what I would feel. I did spend 11 years of my life there, not counting the year I was on sabbatical. I might very well never stay in one place so long ever again. And I stepped out of the plane into the airport and I didn't feel anything. I can cry when I read feel-good stories, I can laugh to tears when I watch puppy videos, but I stepped inside the airport terminal and I just thought it looked like just any small-town airport, of dubious architecture, looking a little drab. I walked toward the exit and thought about all the times I had walked past that checkpoint and still didn't feel a thing. As a matter of fact, I had felt more when I had booked the tickets and imagined returning than when I was actually there. I felt like a business visitor landing in a small town for a conference - just something I had to do, and I hoped I'd have a pleasant trip, but that wasn't home anymore and I wasn't even thinking about the fact that it'd ever been home.
What struck me was how rundown everything looked. I didn't remember it like that. Of course there had been many rundown places in the area when I lived there, but I hadn't planning on driving past them. I stayed at the Hyatt Place (the place to stay if you're in that area, in my opinion - great large and modern guestrooms, great breakfast included in the price, great location) so my Uber driver picked me up at the airport and drove the familiar route along Route 378 to the Historic District. I was shocked when we got off the exit at how shabby the houses looked like, and the sidewalks were all uneven with grass growing in-between. This was right behind the historic block with the supposedly tourist attractions. Even the Historic District itself looked drab and dowdy. Not awful - the way the boarded-up furnaces of Bethlehem Steel looked when I first moved to the area and only knew how to go to work using Route 412 - but nothing to go out of your way to see. Some empty stores, some stores with moss on top of their signs, hite walls that had turned to gray, that sort of thing.
I checked in at Hyatt Place and I walked to Moravian Bookstore, which has a lot of home-decoration items on sale and a room full of books. Back in those days I was very proud to live in a city with an independent bookstore. And I still felt like a professional on a business trip - I had no emotion about being in the bookstore - but I also was impressed by the exceptional quality of the books on display. Since the bookstore has little space, the staff has to be very selective in what they put on their shelves, but they have a very strong selection in a wide range of categories, from fiction to history to poetry. They seem to stock a lot of the Indie Best books, so it is no surprise I like their selection so much. I did buy two books from them, although I had brought plenty of reading on the trip, including When the world stopped to listen by Stuart Isacoff (about Van Cliburn winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in April 1958 - Van Cliburn was from Texas and the famous International Cliburn Piano Competition is organized every four years in Fort Worth, TX near where I live now, of course given my love of piano I watched this year's competition and it was amazing, hence, my decision to buy the book. But I digress. Except for that fact that there are many more cultural things to do for me in Dallas.)
Anyway, I like to support independent bookstores, so I'm now the proud owner of LaRose by Louise Erdrich (I still remember picking up The Round House at the Seattle Airport and reading it cover to cover) and Elizabeth: The Later Years by John Guy, about Queen Elizabeth I. Then I went to Apollo Grill and had a kale salad with tuna, like in the old days. It was delicious. In fact it probably remains the best kale salad I've ever eaten, with strawberries, blueberries, gorgonzola cheese, cucumbers, almonds and balsamic dressing. Their bread is very good. I recognized a lot of the staff.
Two things that struck me when I was walking through Historic Bethlehem were that (i) many people seemed much more overweight and/or seemed to have more health problems than in the area where I live in Dallas, which is admittedly a rather posh and pretentious area, and (ii) many people also seemed to have a far healthier attitude toward clothes and appearances (even the two young women who looked like the absolute sorority girl types - long straight flowing hair, designer's purses, fancy jeans - walked into Apollo Grill in flip flops). In a way, it was as if the health was in the inside. The economy in the LV isn't as good as it should be (it lacks large companies that would provide lots of middle-class jobs for local residents) and a lot of people eat cheap because they can't afford to shop at the more expensive organic stores. I believe that in the long run there are health consequences for, say, eating beef that has been treated with hormones or maybe chicken treated with antibiotics, but some people don't have the luxury of selecting other options. I did find all of them vastly more interesting-looking than the cookie-cutter pseudo-yuppies types. I wish some good companies would finally move to the LV and provide solid employment to a lot of those people, who deserve it. That's what they had when Bethlehem Steel was still around. But perhaps it is unrealistic to hope that companies still behave like that anymore.
My second day I went to Promenade Shops. (I also worked on my novel and a research paper, discovered a new lunch place in the Historic Bethlehem, Cachette, which has a great kale salad with chicken and got a massage at Healing Hands. The reason I arrived a day early is that there was no good weekend flight itinerary on the airline I wanted to fly and I figured I could use some time to work.) I used to go to Promenade Shops almost every week to shop at the organic grocery store (Fresh Market) or get a salad at Cosi - I liked to sit at a high table along the bay window and work on my laptop. I also liked to go to Barnes & Noble. On the way there I had a nice chat with my Uber driver who was telling me she had to go from full time to part time (by doctor's orders) at her job as a packer at a local warehouse because her employer was making her lift 50-100 pounds and that was causing her severe health issues. She said that when another coworker had tried to ask for an improvement they fired her as soon as they could find a reason. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote beautifully about what it is like to be poor in America in Nickel and Dimed many years ago but I still don't think we fully get it, or perhaps things have simply gotten worse for everybody now. I want to read Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city when I get the chance.
At Promenade Shops I went to Barnes & Noble, which was, well, similar to any Barnes & Noble in the nation, except that this one was even more focused on toys and I found its selection not as good as the B&N near Northpark in Dallas. But that bookstore carried me through for many years and I can't criticize it too much. Promenade Shops only opened in December 2006 and my first 2 1/2 years in the LV were, shall I say, a completely different experience, and not in a good way. I was really glad to have it for about 10 years. Then I went to Melt, and the lump crab cake salad with avocado was excellent, although I'm not sure why things are called salads when they don't have greens. And on the way back I looked around me at the road I had taken so many times to go home from Promenade Shops, and the foliage along the road could have used some cutting, and the cars parked in the grass looked beaten up, and I didn't remember there was a Dollar Tree store in the small shopping center along the road. Yet, one thing that appealed to me when I moved there (because I'm full of contradictions) is precisely that it reminded me of my maternal grandmother's small town.
The third day I went to the Evita-inspired specialty dinner at the Shakespeare Festival, followed by a performance of Evita, and that deserves its own post. The DeSales campus was absolutely gorgeous, and the performance phenomenal. In a way, DeSales was my home during my time in the LV much more than Lehigh was.
When people in Texas talk about Bethlehem as a small town I tend to correct them - it's bigger than a small town - but when I saw what it was, with the distance that the year away has given me, I had to admit it very much looked like a small town. While I lived there perhaps I convinced myself that it was way better than it was. Just about everybody wants to find something positive about where they live, even if they end up spending most of their time in New York City. The contrast with my neighborhood in Dallas has been quite eye-opening. Or perhaps the lack of good jobs has taken its toll. Sometimes you don't notice things change around you when you live somewhere because you see the place every day. I still wonder how the blue-collar hard-working people of the LV are going to have the opportunities they deserve and send their kids off to college, even community college. (The area has become a distribution hub, but a lot of the warehouse jobs are minimum wage.) I so wish I had witnessed a renaissance of the area while I was there, and some pockets have done well, such as the Center Valley area, but I don't think the LV has done as well as it should have.
I do love the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, incidentally located in Center Valley - one thing Dallas doesn't do as well as the LV is Shakespeare, and the LV has the extremely talented folks at DeSales and PSF to thank for that. I plan on coming back. There is, after all, still one key advantage to Bethlehem compared to Dallas, even keeping in mind that Bethlehem has humid heat rather than the much-preferred Dallas dry heat: the temperatures weren't hitting 100 this weekend.
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