~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I’m spending a couple of weeks in Pittsburgh, PA, an absolutely beautiful, heavily treed old river city – in fact, a three-river city: the rivers Allegheny and Monongahela meet and make the Ohio River, a good place for a French fort to be built in 1754 and then the British Fort Pitt, built in 1761 after the Brits ran the French out.
I’m staying in Lawrenceville, the first Pittsburgh neighborhood – 1814 – in a three-story brick row house that was built in 1893. There are trees along the narrow sidewalk up and down the street. I hear nothing going on in any room attached to mine. Everything is solid – the stairs – it’s a three-storied thin house, like some of the apartments above the businesses of downtown Jefferson. The floors don’t creak. The doors are wide and fit their frames. The handrail on the stairs is solid oak, shiny and smooth, not a sliver to the touch.
There is a front porch with swing that looks through trees onto Main Street and across to what was once the Foster School and is now the Stephen C. Foster Community Center (as in the famous composer of the early 1800s, who wrote “Oh, Susanna”). Behind it, Andrew Carnegie in 1898 built his first neighborhood library. It is similar to ours in Jefferson.
The row house’s back porches, one on the first floor, one on the second, look out on a garden, a paved alley, and on the other side, three-story brick apartments with gardens.
I’ve wished to live in a treehouse since I was a kid and spent a lot of time gazing out of second story bedroom windows. My second wish about living spaces, after I’d been in an apartment above Lyon’s Photography on the north side in Jefferson, was to live in an apartment above a store. As I grew older and traveled, I still wanted that, but in a big city neighborhood.
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I haven’t made it toa treehouse or second-floor city apartment, and I’m just into my ninth decade. Chances are . . . .
But never give up.
Today in Pittsburgh I learned of a Reverand Asa Lee, head of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, who said in his Sunday sermon a few things that have to do with never giving up; and I took it as especially about what seems like hopeless happenings, tragic situations, or personally dreadful political ones.
I don’t have quotes from Rev. Asa Lee’s talk, but my friend kept notes, which I will summarize:
…there are still things in the world that we care about and require our attention
…pick one – a god, or gods, a place of beauty, something special to you (I decided on trees)
…allow this to convey hope
…use this to remind yourself that there is a whole world out there that is still full of promise
…call on these things
…we can use them for our sustenance
…because we cannot live our lives at the mercy of the world’s hubris.
Because of a world of trees and the words of the Reverand, I am fortunate that I wound up
in Pittsburgh for a while.
