My Town of Endless Returns   I went to Paris two Marches ago. Came back, was asked by a friend of mine, "How was Paris?" I shrugged, said, "It was … fine." "Heather," said Leslie, "You are the only person I know who comes back to Pittsburgh from Paris and says it was fine."               I moved back to Pittsburgh three Julys ago; there was no place left for me to go. My heart was in disrepair; I owed the feds 50 grand for another useless degree in poetry. I’d tried Seattle and I’d done New York. It was time … to come home.               I got a job, a bike, a room in Squirrel Hill, center of the universe. I got up at four to be at Whole Foods Market, my new employer, by five. It was painful, me and my bike and so much rain day after dark day. But I did it, and here we were, my hometown and I, together again at last. Shady Avenue shimmered pitch-black before me. In the twilight of early Sunday morning, a drunk or two hurtled along with me. Otherwise, the East End was empty, fast asleep. Only a few soft lamps from second-story windows on Denniston warmed my way; they said, Good morning, welcome back.               After work I’d walk my bike up the hill on my way back home. I had missed this place, you see, and whizzing by it on a bicycle didn’t always do justice to the low, lush brilliance of the Burgh. I had time, no place special to be, except here, smack in the middle of the moment. Sometimes I’d go by way of Chatham College, my alma mater – I got to go here, I’d think, misty with the memory of my good fortune. It was Chatham, her blood-red brick and canopies of deep green, her breathless view of churches and stone-clad slopes – it was here that I was ruined for any other town. No other place would do.               When I graduated from Chatham, in 1995, I moved to Seattle. I arrived on June 6th and by June 12th, I’m not kidding, I was distraught. Where was the brick? Why was everyone here my age? Where were the Sophie Masloffs creeping along the aisles of the Giant Eagle? Here, in the untethered West, was a slickness with no edge, and down I slid into the petulant despair endemic to so many young cities: I was living in Mecca and loathing it. Two years later, I returned to Pittsburgh for the first time.               That return, in September of 1997, was not out of heartbreak or poverty, but sheer Kierkegaardian homesickness. I’d spent an endless adolescence under so much Pittsburgh slate; each hearth held my story: Seders in the amber glow of a home off the Schenley Golf Course. Winter walks on Aylesboro, eyes straining for a glimpse at the books, beams and lives inside … I was covetous and content in the same breath. College was nippy nighttime bike rides back to bacchanalia, where we’d descend on the tennis courts (now a gymnasium) to make drunken angels in snow. But mostly, everlastingly, my rides were to and from falling in love, over and over, with Pittsburgh, with Pittsburghers, girls and boys and whole families … if it takes a village, then the East End has been mine – Thanks everyone, for bringing me up.               I’d forsaken my history to go someplace hip, and I would forsake it again, in 1998, for graduate school and summers in Brooklyn. But Pittsburgh is a magnanimous rubber band, letting me stray, bringing me back. When I returned, at the end of a cranky, too-hot July in 2003, I begrudged the city and the emotional and financial circumstances that had yanked me back. I wouldn’t stay, I thought, past spring. And then I took that trip to Paris. Paris, where I never waited more than four minutes, even on Sunday, for public transportation. Paris who never closes, whose specialty shops are a way of life and put America’s increasingly monotonous, mall-pocked terrain to shame; Paris whose architectural history arches back across millennia this country can’t imagine. Paris. And never once did my marrow stagger in my bones except to miss, once more, my home.               I’ve accepted, finally, that I need to be up close and frank, on a daily basis, with my personal history, my narrative, that this town writes in smoke from its chimneys, exhaust from its buses, in the heedless tearing of bike tires on snow. But I had to go West, then East, and ultimately across the Atlantic to be willing to acknowledge, with unabashed glee, my place in the world.               But I’ll tell you, that itch to leave, it still creeps over me from time to time. I get it on my arms and chest, a dry red rash, or a cough in summer that rasps, Anywhere but here, and tries to convince me that I am somehow too good for this joint. I miss New York, you know, with its radiator s and boxed-in white walls, its myth of anonymity. Also, I’d like to make some cash (sigh) and I’ll concede there’s not much of that going on around here. But if I stop to look at what it is, for me, about the alleged autonomy of being a New Yorker and having lots of money – it’s about pretending I don’t need a damn thing from anyone, an enchanting little lie I tell myself from time to time.               My mother raised me in the city. What this meant for me was early and insatiable self-determination. There was no waiting listlessly around with Atari and The Disney Channel for the moment I turned 16 and could drive. I was already out there, cruising the scene. These were the days of Atlantic Books on Forbes, and Heads Together and The Bookworm on Murray. Okay, I know that Heads Together still exists, but, first of all, they no longer sell waterbeds (or a few other unmentionables, I might add). Waterbeds that had canopies made of mirrors. After school, Katie – my best friend in 7th grade – and I would rush over and hurl ourselves down under this mirror to gossip and doze and giggle and know, indisputably, that no other 12-year-olds had ever napped in a waterbed - and beneath our lithe, lucky reflections to prove it! Nor does Heads Together any longer reside in a dank rambling basement, the one side of which became the vast pulp library that was, essentially, my education.               So I’m fifteen and looking for love and suddenly The Bookworm hops into bed with Heads Together, and now all the musty used books and cult foreign videos a budding radical scholar could want are in one giant room together. And they’re open till something unprecedented like midnight! And the hippest, most fetching folks I’ve ever met, Michael, Jessie, and Julia are all behind the counter, as if to beckon, We’ve been waiting for you! In a single breath, they became my heroes, who without flinching spiritually spoon-fed this ravenous, desperate, kinda-bright kid … Jesus, I was just a kid then, a kid who would die, just jump up and down and die to say, These are my friends. And you know, they were.               Julia gave me my first copy of A Room of One’s Own. I still have it. My best friends Camille and Erika had just left for college and I was crestfallen, and, Julia, you knew it! You knew what it meant when life-altering 18-year-olds leave a sad, smart-in-every-wrong-way 15-year-old to fend for herself in high school. You were 26, Julia; you knew everything. And for one solid showery afternoon you let me stay there, at your fluorescent, too-beige Atlantic Books, that small, innocuous forerunner of today’s monster stores (we had no idea what was coming, or did we?). You let me just hang out and read, and mope, and wander around bewildered. And between ringing up customers and shelving discount trade books, you just, well, loved me from that kind, radiant distance of yours. Julia, you have no idea what that meant to me. Moments like these, the ones we remember and write about nearly two decades later, our anthems to one another – these hours and encounters were how I learned to socialize, how I learned to talk to people, how I learned what I like and do not like, how I learned who I am, and these hours and encounters – they happen IN THE CITY.               Miracles happen here. For example, check this out: July will mark three years of my living back in The Burgh. I no longer work at Whole Foods. In fact, that arboretum of an alma mater I mentioned biking through? I get to teach Creative Writing there, full-time, beginning in August. That’s right: Dr. Heather McNaugher, Assistant Professor of English, Chatham College, Pittsburgh, PA. Now, when I set out for college 15 years ago, if you had asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up, I would have said without blinking, "I want to teach creative writing at a small liberal arts college." Even then I was too superstitious to name the college; even then I knew the odds. Do you know one of the things I had going for me as I interviewed with Chatham? My unapologetic devotion to Pittsburgh. One of the interviewers said to me, "We feel you wouldn’t use this opportunity as a stepping stone to some, uh, glitzier school or city." I nearly laughed out loud. "Are you kidding?" I replied. "Everywhere else is a stepping stone to here." What I’m saying is, your most precise, most far-flung dreams come true if you simply sit still and let them.               You know, sometimes I’ll be walking around the East End and I’ll have it, The Feeling. Now, this is The Feeling that has no adjectives; it’s indescribable. Let’s just say, it’s The Feeling that makes me a writer. And, because it’s impossible to accurately convey, I will keep on being a writer in the soaring, always already failed attempt to describe The Feeling. This feeling only happens in Pittsburgh, on some tight street with its awnings of ivy, at around say, dusk in early summer, or on the first snowy night, folks just coming home from work and turning on the lamps inside their brick homes, so many books in there, so many entire lives going on, so many deep, fulfilled breaths or difficult intimacies to imagine. As I wander by, the feeling I get is a soft collision of nostalgia and hope: nostalgia for all those times I was setting out towards love, and hope for all the times I will again set out for love. Love of my town, love of my life, love of my history and of my future, and my new love affair with right now, right this minute – all of it fondly jam-packed with memories. Pittsburgh has given me the most exquisite, earnest, hard-earned memories a girl could ask for. Of course I’m going to stick around for more. Anything else would be ungrateful. Anything less would be denying myself my self.               Any writer writing about Pittsburgh feels sheepishly indebted to and resentful of – you got it, Michael Chabon. In 1989 I had an emotionally disastrous, uh, entanglement with a girl named ... we’ll just call her J (you know, to protect the living, and me from a law suit). It was J who introduced me to Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which had just hit shelves and window displays across America, but with special tenderness, of course, in our town. Like I said, it was 1989. I was 16. I would see copies of it stacked in the window of Atlantic Books in Squirrel Hill. Confession: I thought it was a cookbook. Even as I peddled towards the first stirrings of my infatuation with this city, I couldn’t yet fathom its mysteries and so I thought, How quaint, someone wrote a cookbook of pierogies and make-your-own Primanti Brothers’ sandwiches. And then one summer night, J and I stood locked in a face-off on my Sherbrook Street porch. Emotionally, I had shut down by then, just in time as I’m apt to do, and J’s eyes poured love, incomprehension and not a little wrath. She rammed her fist into her LL Bean bookbag and brought out a book, the same white hardcover with the bright squiggly writing I’d seen all over town. This she shoved into my dumb chest and ordered, "Read it." She flew from my porch for the last time that summer. As I stood there, reeling a bit, back and forth on the balls of my sneakers, I could still feel her tiny teeth along my neck from our afternoon together. That night I did as she instructed and read Chabon’s novel in about three hours. When narrator Art Bechstein tells us, like it’s a secret, "I was in love with Arthur Lecomte," I knew in my sternum J’s message to me, and that it was too late, and that I had better pay attention next time.               But even more keenly, I felt cheated. Cheated, obliged, one-upped, dazzled – because this heartbreaking, eloquent stranger had already written my novel, about my town, and I hadn’t even known it was in me. I was 16, for God’s sake, give me a minute! I hadn’t even gotten a chance to want to write this book and someone had beaten me to it. I’ve never forgiven you for that, Mr. Chabon, and I will continue to read every word you put to paper, and worship you in spite of myself. Alas. And I’ll tell you about another time, more recently: in the window of Caliban not too long ago was a copy of The New Yinzer’s anthology of Pittsburgh love stories. Now, you’ll notice I hope, after our journey here together, that I am a walking sloshing coffee urn of Pittsburgh love stories, one after the other, all over both sleeves. Not only could I tell you a thing or two more about my love affairs in Pittsburgh; I am eternally Pittsburgh’s, period. So, you can imagine how pissed I was when I saw yet another chance gone by, mocking me from yet another smug window. For years it’s been like, Sorry, champ, you missed the boat, and it’s your own slothful, ill-fated fault.               Well, listen, I’m back. And I’m paying attention. And I’m not missing another boat, you hear? Not one more novel. Not one more love story. I’m back. Ready? Heather McNaugher was born in Syracuse, NY. As soon as she could walk, she headed for Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The 12th Street Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Blithe House Quarterly and Dirt Rag. She has a Ph.D. in English from The State University of New York at Binghamton. Tim Brown has two different faces. He can make one fat by smoking cigarettes and is simply irresistible to gay men. Tim is currently working on a comics series called Gumption, due out in September.