Strangely nervous, yet quietly excited—that is what comes to mind when I think back to that Saturday morning in June, the day before Father’s Day, when I boarded a Trans-Bridge bus in New York City and headed home in the misty rain. Home to the place I was born, Allentown, Pennsylvania, whose citizens had long taken great pride in its designation, three times, as an “All-America City” (by the National Civic League), a pride that sustained itself in the sneaky, encircling warmth of Gemütlichkeit. Allentown had been through many transformations in the years since I came of age in the fifties and sixties, demographically and otherwise, and I was, frankly, both apprehensive and curious about what awaited me. I was hoping to find out whether it is ever possible to come home again and not just to be passing through, fully aware that the concept and deep-seated notion of “home” and “place” is different for everyone. I felt fortunate to have grown up in King’s America—Martin Luther King Jr. being the only king who ever mattered to me and the only one I recognized—but in a Pennsylvania Dutch culture that required me to learn German in school. (The learning of that unlovely language was not easy, but it helped me better understand certain expressions—warsh and mox good and quit rutchin—and, best of all, led me to an ongoing love of the poetry of Rilke, thanks to my eleventh-grade English teacher, the incomparable Dorothy Papp. So I offer no complaints.)
I had last been back in 2004, when my mother died, a trip that had been difficult in many ways, just as our relationship had been. When my daughter Logan was born, in 1993, just three months after my father died, it saddened me that he would not be able to take her, as he did me, to Hook’s Diner on Sunday mornings for breakfast, to hear him say, “Doris, my granddaughter will have hotcakes, thin and brown, thin and brown, and please bring her a glass of chocolate milk, made from scratch with Hershey’s Syrup. And a side of well-done scrapple.” Doris and Mabel and Hilda—all of them wore squeaky shoes with rubber soles and happily put up with his repeating an order they knew by heart. I know of no other way to put this: My father loved being from Allentown. It’s the third-largest city in Pennsylvania but has the distinct feel of a small town, where he could enjoy being a well-liked, everyday guy, a Rotarian and owner of Coleman’s Department Store—not to mention having a bookie and the luxury of being able to go to Vegas on all-expense-paid trips. I knew he would have wanted Logan to understand she was in, and of, a place where eating Habbersett scrapple (with either ketchup or syrup) was part of what you did and part of who you were, in the same way that another Allentonian, the actor Amanda Seyfried, of early Mean Girls fame, continues to long for the Shrove Tuesday fastnachts made by Mary Ann Donut Kitchen on Liberty Street.
I was surprised not to know of Seyfried’s connection to Allentown until recently. We had gone to the same high school, William Allen (the city’s founder, a Colonial grandee, and a Loyalist during the American Revolution), the front of which looks the way a high school should—imposing, with many steps to climb before you enter, the best sort of challenge. Before heading home that day, I was interested to learn that Seyfried, who also worked in the school’s candy store when she wasn’t auditioning in New York, continued to view Allentown and the greater Lehigh Valley as her true home. “I hope you can feel my Allentown roots,” she told an interviewer, “because they live in me forever.” Not only are her parents still living in the house where Amanda grew up, but her father continues to look after her cat.