By Sean Kirst / The Post Standard
Tuesday morning, before I left for work, I made a call to Ray, a mechanic at Ed & Frank’s on South Avenue. A headlight was out on our van, and I wondered if I could stop by later in the week to get it fixed.
“Stop by now,” Ray said. So I drove to the garage on my way downtown. Ray took a break from what he was doing. He came out and fixed the light.
A mechanic you can trust, who’s there when you need him. I’ve lived in towns where I never found anyone like that, and maybe it doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but it helps to explain why we’re still in Syracuse.
It’s been 20 years. That hit me last week, a day or two before Christmas, as I was standing in line at the Columbus Bakery on Pearl Street. As you get older, you fully appreciate the little pleasures. One of my favorite rituals in this town is getting some black coffee at Freedom of Espresso, and then walking over to Columbus for a loaf of bread that smells about as good as anything on earth.
As I waited, I got to thinking about how my family is closing out 20 years in Syracuse, and just how much we’ve come to love this place. The funny thing is, we had zero connection when we arrived. I had been working at a paper in Niagara Falls, and my wife and I needed better jobs. We both had ailing parents and we didn’t want to leave the region, so I sent applications to every big paper at this end of the state.
They hired me here. I started off in a bureau in Oswego, and The Post-Standard eventually brought me into Syracuse. I “came downtown,” as we called it at the paper, with limited knowledge of the community: I knew the Iroquois Confederacy was born near Onondaga Lake. I knew Lee Alexander was a brilliant mayor whose self-destruction broke the city’s heart. I knew about the famous green-over-red traffic signal on Tipperary Hill.
That was about it. We were nomads, and we were used to moving around, and we had no belief that we’d settle in Syracuse. We started off with a flat in a noisy college neighborhood, but everything changed on the day we moved into our second apartment, on South Geddes Street. That night, the dog and I took a walk to the top of the nearby Woodland Reservoir. I turned and saw the lights of the city rolling toward the horizon, and I thought:
My God. What a beautiful town.
Which it is, even if it hardly gets projected that way. We discovered that Syracuse is a magnificent place for moonlight sledding, because it is a city of vistas. I love the view from Tipp Hill, in which the spires of Sacred Heart and the faraway Church of the Assumption line up like celestial goal posts, or the view from Schiller Park of the rippling farmland beyond the city, or the incredible view that opens up as you near Syracuse on Interstate 81, and you see the towers of downtown tucked into the green folds of the valley.
As for daily life, we’d always dreamed of finding a neighborhood where our kids could walk to school and play kickball in the street, a place where they’d grow up with friends from a wild hodgepodge of experience.
By good fortune, in Syracuse, that fell into our laps.
So we stayed. My wife became a teacher in the city schools, and I came into a job that for me is as good as it gets. Any notion of going elsewhere slipped away. The door of our house, in a city neighborhood, is within a few minutes’ walk of quiet trails in the woods. In the autumn, we can drive to pick apples in 10 minutes. I still treasure my monthly visits at the Regional Market with Louie, the same barber who gave my kids their first haircuts.
And despite many instances locally of sheer political madness, we’ve found solace in thoughtful friends — true believers — who dare to think Syracuse can be great ...
Which it is, depending on what you see and what you want. Twenty years ago, we arrived with no plans to settle here. Then you wake up one day surrounded by neighbors that you love, in a city whose grand vistas never fail to lift your heart.
No one says it. It just happens. You realize you are home.
http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2010/12/syracuse_in_the_eye_of_this_be.html
