Caught in the Rain

What I meant to post nearly two weeks ago…

Lately, I haven’t been liking Pittsburgh very much. I think I’m overwhelmed with a lot of different things. For while I’m quite accustomed to hitting a 3-month point of “why-did-we-move-here-blues”, to top off the move with marriage, a new job and a coming baby is more than I have experience with. It’s been especially frustrating to live in a huge city when you look at a list from your insurance provider of nearly 500 OBGYNs within 10 miles of your doorstep. I love cities…as long as I live about 30 miles from them. I’m not real excited about living in one.

So, it had been a hard day when Ed and I decided to go for a walk. Just as we stepped outside the door, it started to sprinkle a little. But neither one of us are very sweet, and nor are we witches from the west, so we figured we wouldn’t melt. And we didn’t. Just about half way through the walk, we got hit by a downpour.

Thankfully, Pittsburgh is not Indiana. There are trees. We stopped under one on the main street of Avalon, but it wasn’t doing a lot for us. Ed suggested we dart across the street and duck under the eaves of an old, stone church (which we learned a few minutes later is an antique place now). But then Ed saw an old man waving to us from his porch. So, we dashed over there.

This was an old man (in his mid-80s at a guess) who was old school. He offered me the empty chair on the porch. He asked Ed what he did for a living (not me) and he shook Ed’s hand (not mine). Either old age or health concerns was robbing the man of his voice, but he was happy to visit with us. He said he had lived in that house for 65 years, he and his new bride moving in not long after they were married. He told us the old church was an antique place. He and Ed exchanged stories and memories of St. Anne’s over in Castle Shannon. That’s where Ed grew up and went to school through the 7^th grade. This man’s wife had grown up over there and they were married in the old St. Anne’s (which was torn down before Ed was born). Since his wife was from the “South Hills” and this man from the “North Hills” (which, to Pittsburghers, is two different worlds), I asked how he had met his wife.

One day he had been downtown walking somewhere and saw this girl through the windows of a store that’s no longer there. So, he went in and walked up to the counter where she was working. He didn’t say much more than “hi” and then left. Two weeks later, he was walking by there again and decided to go see her. But, she was no longer there. Another girl told him that she had quit a week ago because she had just graduated from high school and was moving onto something else.

“But,” the girl added, “she said if you ever stopped back in, I was to give you this.”

It was a folded piece of paper with her phone number inside. So, he called her. And they were married for 58 years before she passed away in 2004.

By then, it had stopped raining. We said good bye to this kind man who had let us sit on his porch for 10 minutes and headed towards home. A rather nice ending to a day of Pittsburgh-blues.