Commuting Towards the New Jerusalem
Albert Louis Zambone
January 1, 2000
I did not move to Oxford, England, intending to fall in love, but then again, people rarely do. But once I was here, I discovered one of Oxford's best features: the opportunity to jump on a bus and for a very reasonable price find myself, an hour or so later, in London.
London is not the first city to capture my heart. Philadelphia, which is where I was born, and near where I grew up, will always be "The City" for me, as in the three-year-old's question, "Are we going to The City?" Washington, D.C., too, has been a great love since I visited it as a child and was enamored of the Mall and the buildings standing solemnly along it. Baltimore, where I was an undergraduate, I love with a fierce and possessive love which came from defending it against cynical New Yorkers in exile there. I came late and hesitantly to New York, and only because it was greatly loved by people I myself loved; and I was undone by its magnificence and grandeur and energy and all the things people have ever said about it.
I could go on and on about all these cities, and about others: Chicago and San Francisco, for instance, and all sorts of medium-sized and small cities which have been crudely abused and which deserve better, like Roanoke, Virginia, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My list of traveling regrets has a lot of American cities on it, ones I've traveled past, ones I hope to go to sometime, ones I should spend more time in.
London might be far geographically from all these places, but it makes me think about all of them. Maybe it is because London seems to unlock primal memories within me. A wise man once told me that he thought every English speaker needed to make at least one trip to England so that they could see the landscape that had shaped ...
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