“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going…”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
I’m sorry, Mr. Wolfe. You can go home again, and we’re over the moon. There’s actually a ‘we’ to this story. And the decision to blow up our lives – at our age – was a mutual one, and it occurred on the sidewalk. Outside St. Lucy’s Church. On Easter Sunday. Yes, the homily was that good.
My life, our lives, have been a whirlwind since then. So, let me slow down and back up a little bit and explain how two people late in their careers, on the senior side of middle age, came to such a life-altering moment while walking to their car after church on Sunday morning.
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My fiancé (yes, we’re lovebirds!) was born and raised in Scranton, but left decades ago when he joined the Air Force. I was born in Bay City, MI, a town built on lumber and ship-building. Perhaps, that explains my interest in the American side of the Industrial Revolution, and my love of the literature from that era.
Bay City is an old town that’s seen better days, sure, but it’s still steeped in rich, romantic history, like Scranton. The lumber barons’ Victorian homes dot tree-lined thoroughfares and pockets of old immigrant neighborhoods can still be found throughout the area. It’s a beautiful city and a nitty gritty town, but Bay City never lost its pride or its dignity even though most of its industry has long since ground to a halt. I thought Scranton must be like that and that’s why I asked my beloved, Anthony Cianfichi, to take me to his hometown. I longed to see what kind of city had shaped my man, and to see if it was anything like my own experience.
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Tony and I met at what was a particularly bad time for both of us. His wife had passed away suddenly the year before; and I was burned out and lonely. We each had had moments of closed-door despair, thinking we had reached the last chapter of our lives without ever grasping that golden ring. Then last summer, when our first date for morning coffee turned into a 13-hour marathon that also included lunch, dinner, and a turn on the giant Ferris wheel at National Harbor, everything changed.
***
Neither of us knew what to expect in Scranton. We whizzed around to all of Tony’s old haunts, his boyhood home, Cabrini Elementary, Scranton Prep. We stopped by St. Anne’s Basilica, which, in Tony’s day, was a monastery. He recounted the Feast of St. Anne festivals he’d attended; he regaled me with stories from his youth as we walked the grounds of his parish, St. Lucy’s. He pointed out the locations where Woolworths, the Globe and favorite haunts once stood. We sat at the counter of the Coney Island diner, chomping on a Texas Wiener, a well-kept “secret from mom,” between a long-ago father and his son. At Steamtown, we saw the railway roundhouse where his grandfather once worked.
Then, down on Main Street, the angels sang, the clouds parted, and sunbeams bathed our car. Ok, not really.
But, Catalano’s . . . .
He. Could. Not. Believe. This. Important. Place. From. His. Past. was not only still there but that It. Looked. Exactly. The. Same.
Tony stood in the pungent aisle, soaking in the sights and aromas wordlessly, his countenance suddenly much brighter and lighter than I had ever seen it before. I felt like I was watching the boy who’d been sent to the store by his mother for sausage and fresh bread, oh, so many years ago.
You can go home again, Tony. Sometimes, you can, and it’s just as great as you remembered.
***
Easter Sunday
We worked our way into the pew at St. Lucy’s, buoyed by the beauty of the white lilies and yellow chrysanthemums exploding at the Italian marble altar, the bright ceiling frescoes and jeweled-tone stained glass windows. It was a great ending to our whirlwind romance with the Electric City. Scranton, with its examples of Romanesque, gothic, renaissance and Victorian architecture, its sweeping vistas and nitty gritty neighborhoods, is captivating, bewitching, even.
As we left St. Lucy’s and I surveyed the rain-washed neighborhood, I repeated a mantra from Saturday one last time: “I really like Scranton. I think I could live here.” Only this time when Tony looked at me I could see in his eyes that an idea was taking shape. “Could you really? Do you think you could live here? Because, I really feel like I’m home again.”
And then we knew. We were going to come home. We knew that in finding Scranton, we had also found ourselves.
This blog will follow our journey as we make the dream of moving to Scranton a reality. Why did this industrial city touch us so deeply? How does one find a new job at our age? What did Scranton help us find in ourselves? Stay tuned and, like Bette says, buckle your seat belt, because it’s going to be a wild, and quite possibly, a bumpy ride.
Finding Scranton 