Pittsburgh City Quotes

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

Pittsburgh. I'd been there. One of the most underrated cities in North America. People who'd never been there thought of it as a graveyard of abandoned steel mills, but it was a beautiful city, and it would be good to have it back.

I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.

I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox.

The water nymphs who came to Poseidon explained how little they desired to couple with the gods. Except to find out whether it was different, whether there was a fresh world, another dimension in their loins. In the old Pittsburgh, we dreamed of a city where women read Proust in the original French, and wondered whether we would cross over into a different joy if we paid a call girl a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour. Would it be different in kind or only tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great love might make everything else an exile. It turned out that being together at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria did, indeed, measure everything after that.

The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.

In any case, it's not enough to be a liberal...That is something that people have a great deal of difficulty with. But it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that. I am telling you this because I have watched what happened to many of my liberal friends when the civil rights movement was in Alabama, let us say, in the Deep South, and they were very indignant. And then I watched what happened imperceptibly but fatally when the same movement moved north to Brooklyn, to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and New York. And their attitudes changed. I really have to put it to you that way, but that is what happened. Their attitudes changed because they began to feel more and more threatened, and a liberal facade or even a liberal attitude was not enough to deal with the speed with which the movement was moving and the complications of American life as revealed in the fact by the interracial tensions in every major city, and being liberal was no defense against that and no interpretation of that.

I was Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful. Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful meant Friday evenings downstairs at Savoy in the Strip District, and perhaps a table upstairs if it was your birthday. It meant Alpha and Que boat rides, NEED Scholarship dinners, and Ronald H. Brown Leadership Awards galas. It meant a stint on the Urban League Young Professionals executive board. It meant brunches at the LeMont on Mother’s Day and the Grand Concourse when you wanted to stunt. It meant frequent pictures in the Post-Gazette and the City Paper

The country, it seemed, was on the verge of a second civil war, this one over industrial slavery. But Frick was a gambler who cared little what the world thought of him. He was already a villain in the public’s eye, thanks to a disaster of epic proportions three years earlier. Frick and a band of wealthy friends had established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club on land near an unused reservoir high in the hills above the small Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. The club beautified the grounds around the dam but paid little attention to the dam itself, which held back the Conemaugh River and was in poor condition from years of neglect. On May 31, 1889, after heavy rainfall, the dam gave way, releasing nearly 5 billion gallons of water from Lake Conemaugh into Johnstown and killing 2,209 people. What became known as the Johnstown Flood caused $17 million in damages. Frick’s carefully crafted corporate structure for the club made it impossible for victims to pursue the financial assets of its members. Although he personally donated several thousands of dollars to relief efforts, Frick remained to many a scoundrel, the prototype of the uncaring robber baron of the Gilded Age.

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Jack Gilbert, who was not related to me—unfortunately for me. Jack Gilbert was a great poet, but if you’ve never heard of him, don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. He never much cared about being known. But I knew about him, and I loved him dearly from a respectful distance, so let me tell you about him. Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in the midst of that city’s smoke, noise, and industry. He worked in factories and steel mills as a young man, but was called from an early age to write poetry. He answered the call without hesitation. He became a poet the way other men become monks: as a devotional practice, as an act of love, and as a lifelong commitment to the search for grace and transcendence. I think this is probably a very good way to become a poet. Or to become anything, really, that calls to your heart and brings you to life.

Now at that time in 1959 Pittsburgh was a popping place, it was called Little New York. Pittsburgh had live entertainment all the jazz greats was from here or came through Pittsburgh. We had find jazz clubs, the best rhythm and blues dance halls, the city was a jumping place for black entertainment.

Sometimes I almost believe her soul looks out of the photograph, almost clears the sill Of the eyes & comes near; though it does not ever Move, it holds me while I look at it. But even today, I can’t conceive of a soul Without seeing a woman’s body. Specifically, Yours, undoing the straps of an evening dress In a convertible, & then lying back, your breasts Holding that hint of dusk mixed with mint And the emptiness of dusk. Someone put it Crudely: to fuck is to know. If that is true, There’s a corollary: the soul is a canary sent Into the mines. The convertible is white, & parked Beneath the black trees shading the river, Mile after mile. Your dress is off by now, And when you come, both above & below me, When you vanish into that one cry which means Your body is no longer quite your own And when your face looks like a face stricken From this world, a saint’s face, your eyes closing On some final city made entirely Of light, & only to be unmade by light Again—at that moment I’m still watching You—half out of reverence & half because The scene is distant, like a landscape, & has Nothing to do with me. Beneath the quiet Of those trees, & that sky, I imagine I’m simply a miner in a cave; I imagine the soul Is something lighter than a girl’s ribbon I witnessed, one afternoon, as it fell—blue, Tossed, withered somehow, & singular, at A friend’s wedding—& then into the river And swirled away. Do I chip away with my hammer? Do I, sometimes, sing or recite? Even though I have to know, in such a darkness, all The words by heart, I sing. And when I come, My eyes are closed fast. I smile, under The earth. They loved fast horses. And someone else Will have to watch them, grazing on short tufts Of spring grass beside the riverbank, When we are gone, when we are light, & grass. . — Larry Levis, from “A Letter,” Winter Stars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)

The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill.

Lenny Bruce and Honey Harlow made love, partied, and hung out in the calm blue waves; Caught the sun between them, and its all-consuming power fused their twisted souls together like a live wire. The guardrail separating their psyche annihilated in ecstatic firestorms of lust as the racecars of their consci shot through the tunnels of each others’ pupils simultaneously when they came. This was the early days of their wild life together. Before the car crash that cracked her pelvis in Pittsburgh, and almost killed her at the apex of her vixen stripper body’s sexual peak of prowess. Bruce and Honey were in love. They should’ve never left Miami Beach.

They made love, partied, and hung out in the calm blue waves; Caught the sun between them, and its all-consuming power fused their twisted souls together like a live wire. The guardrail separating their psyche annihilated in ecstatic firestorms of lust as the racecars of their consci shot through the tunnels of each others’ pupils simultaneously when they came. This was the early days of their wild life together. Before the car crash that cracked her pelvis in Pittsburgh, and almost killed her at the apex of her vixen stripper body’s sexual peak of prowess. Bruce and Honey were in love. They should’ve never left Miami Beach.

Somewhere in the air over Blacksburg, Virginia The old man checked his new gold watch, given in appreciation for his fifty years of service to the City of Pittsburgh. He lifted the window screen and pressed his head against the oval window in the side of the plane. The glass was cold

The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.

imagining her museum a centerpiece of Pittsburgh’s renaissance, the city’s transformation from dying steel town to gleaming technology center, from Rust Belt dinosaur to American Florence, a center of intellectual and cultural life. Or

Dungy sees something that no one else does. He sees proof that his plan is starting to work. Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. For seventeen years, he prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. Four times in the past decade, he had been invited to interview for head coaching positions with NFL teams. All four times, the interviews hadn’t gone well. Part of the problem was Dungy’s coaching philosophy. In his job interviews, he would patiently explain his belief that the key to winning was changing players’ habits. He wanted to get players to stop making so many decisions during a game, he said. He wanted them to react automatically, habitually. If he could instill the right habits, his team would win. Period. “Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits? Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create new habits, Dungy would answer. Players spent their lives building the habits that got them to the NFL. No athlete is going to abandon those patterns simply because some new coach says to. So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.3.5 His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

Political consultant James Carville aptly captured this dynamic when he described Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” Cities, no matter where they are, have more in common with other cities. The same is true of rural areas. In that sense, central Pennsylvania is more like most of Alabama than it is like Philadelphia.

astute drivers will echo local inflections like the “Pittsburgh left,” that act of driving practiced primarily in the Steel City (but also Beijing) in which the change of a traffic light to green is an “unofficial” signal for a left-turning driver to quickly bolt across the oncoming traffic. New arrivals to Los Angeles soon become versed in the “California roll,” a.k.a. the “sushi stop,” which involves never quite coming to a complete halt at a stop sign.

Pittsburgh, in contrast, had a large and active bar. In fact, Allegheny County had one of the highest concentrations of attorneys per capita in the nation; the bar approached ten thousand practicing attorneys. Mainly, because Pittsburgh was the kind of city newcomers moved into gladly but natives had to be dragged kicking and screaming to leave.

Still, I wonder sometimes what we are asking when we ask if findings apply elsewhere. Is it that we really believe that something could happen in Pittsburgh but never in Albuquerque, in Memphis but never in Dubuque? The weight of the evidence is in the other direction, especially when it comes to problems as big and as widespread as urban poverty and unaffordable housing. This study took place in the heart of a major American city, not in an isolated Polish village or a brambly Montana town or on the moon.15 The number of evictions in Milwaukee is equivalent to the number in other cities, and the people summoned to housing court in Milwaukee look a lot like those summoned in Charleston and Brooklyn. Maybe what we are really asking when we ask if a study is “generalizable” is: Can it really be this bad everywhere? Or maybe we’re asking: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem? —

The answer to the polio mystery, also well known, came from Jonas Salk, who was born in New York City of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and eventually was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (by way of New York University and Michigan). His vaccine weakened the poliovirus with formaldehyde and mineral water. It effectively “killed” the poliovirus. But it was recognizable enough for the immune system to pick it up. Ta-da! It cut the risk of infection in half. The country scrambled to produce and disseminate the vaccine as quickly as possible. Alas, this happy ending comes with an asterisk. The first big batch of vaccine wasn’t properly made. Cutter Laboratories in California, one of the main producers of the vaccine, inoculated more than 200,000 children in 1955, and within days there were reports of paralysis. Within a month, the program was discontinued, and investigations revealed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.

On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill. In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns. Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.

Of American cities, Pittsburgh was the smokiest, partly because of its location, partly because of its heavy industry. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, visiting Canada and the United States in 1861, judged Pittsburgh to be “the blackest place which I ever saw.” The site was “picturesque,” Trollope thought, “for the spurs of the mountains come down close round the town, and the rivers are broad and swift.” Pittsburgh’s setting at the foot of the Alleghenies, in a deep valley at the junction of two rivers, was one reason it collected smoke: “Even the filth and wondrous blackness of the place are picturesque when looked down upon from above. The tops of the churches are visible, and some of the larger buildings may be partially traced through the thick, brown, settled smoke. But the city itself is buried in a dense cloud.”11

This is what she becomes because of me… what do you think of here… do you like her or heat? Are you going to hate her for this? ~*~ ‘They don't leave. They bring in their food from the outside, from quite far away sometimes. It gives their guard something to do when they're not out annihilating mavericks. Or protecting Volterra from exposure…’ ‘From situations like this one, like Marcel,’ I finished her sentence. It was amazingly easy to say his name now. I wasn't sure what the difference was. Maybe because- I wasn't planning on living much longer without seeing him. Or at all, if we were too late. It was comforting to know that I would have an easy out. ‘I doubt they've ever had a situation quite like this,’ she muttered, disgusted. ‘You don't get a lot of suicidal angels.’ The sound that escaped out of my mouth was very quiet, but Olivia seemed to understand that it was a cry of pain. She wrapped her thin, strong arm around my shoulders. ‘We'll do what we can, Bell. It's not over yet.’ ‘Not yet.’ I let her comfort me, though I knew she thought our chances were poor. ‘And the Ministry will get us if we mess up.’ Olivia stiffened. ‘You say that like it's a good thing.’ I shrugged. ‘Knock it off, Bell, or we're turning around in New York and going back to Pittsburgh.’ ‘What?’ ‘You know what. If we're too late for Marcel, I'm going to do me damnedest to get you back to Mr. Anderson, and I don't want any trouble from you. Do you understand that?’ ‘Sure, Olivia.’ She pulled back slightly so that she would glare at me. ‘No trouble.’ ‘Scout's honor,’ I muttered. She rolled her eyes. ‘Let me concentrate, now. I'm trying to see what he's planning.’ She left her arm around me, but let her head fall back against the seat and closed her eyes. She pressed her free hand to the side of her face, rubbing her fingertips against her temple. I watched her in fascination for a long time. Eventually, she became utterly motionless, her face like a stone sculpture. The minutes passed, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought she'd fallen asleep. I didn't dare interrupt her to ask what was going on. I wished there was something safe for me to think about. I couldn't allow myself to consider the horrors we were headed toward, or, more horrific yet, the chance that we might fail-not if I wanted to keep from screaming aloud. I couldn't anticipate anything, either. If I were very, very, very lucky, I would somehow be able to save Marcel. But I wasn't so stupid as to think that saving him would mean that I could stay with him. I was no different, no more special than I'd been before. There would be no new reason for him to want me now. Seeing him and losing him again… I fought back against the pain. This was the price I had to pay to save his life. I would pay for it. They showed a movie, and my neighbor got headphones. Sometimes, I watched the figures moving across the little screen, but I couldn't even tell if the movie was supposed to be a romance or a horror film. After an eternity, the plane began to descend toward New York City. Olivia remained in her trance. I dithered, reaching out to touch her, only to pull my hand back again. This happened a dozen times before the plane touched down with a jarring impact. ‘Olivia,’ I finally said. ‘Olivia, we have to go.’ I touched her arm. Her eyes came open very slowly. She shook her head from side to side for a moment.

They showed a movie, and my neighbor got headphones. Sometimes, I watched the figures moving across the little screen, but I couldn't even tell if the movie was supposed to be a romance or a horror film. After an eternity, the plane began to descend toward New York City. Olivia remained in her trance. I dithered, reaching out to touch her, only to pull my hand back again. This happened a dozen times before the plane touched down with a jarring impact. ‘Olivia,’ I finally said. ‘Olivia, we have to go.’ I touched her arm. Her eyes came open very slowly. She shook her head from side to side for a moment. ‘Anything new?’ I asked in a faint voice, conscious of the man listening on the other side of me. ‘Not exactly,’ she breathed in a voice I could barely catch. ‘He's getting closer. He's deciding how he's going to ask.’ We had to run for our connection, but that was good-better than having to wait. As soon as the plane was in the air, Olivia closed her eyes and slid back into the same stupor as before. I waited as patiently as I could. When it was dark again, I opened the window to stare out into the flat black that was no better than the window shade. I was grateful that I'd had so many months' practice with controlling my thoughts. Instead of dwelling on the terrifying possibilities that, no matter what Olivia said I did not intend to survive, I concentrated on lesser problems. Like, what I was going to say to Mr. Anderson if I got back:' That was a thorny enough problem to occupy several hours, and Marcel? He had promised to wait for me, but did that promise still apply? Would I end up home alone in Pittsburgh, with no one at all? I didn't want to survive, no matter what happened. It felt like seconds later when Olivia shook my shoulder-I hadn't realized I'd fallen asleep. ‘Bell,’ she hissed, her voice a little too loud in the darkened cabin full of sleeping humans. I wasn't disoriented-I hadn't been out long enough for that. ‘What's wrong?

That was the summer of the Great Railroad Strike and for much of the country it was a dark, discouraging time. Half a dozen cities were hit by walkouts and violence. In Baltimore twelve people were shot down by militia. Pittsburgh was in the grip of a mob for two straight days. Millions of dollars’ worth of railroad equipment was destroyed in Pittsburgh alone. The Union Depot was burned, stores were looted, and a pitched battle between rioters and soldiers took the lives of fifty-seven. It was the bloodiest labor uprising the country had ever known and it left much of the populace wondering what in the world was happening to life in America.

We children lived and breathed our history—our Pittsburgh history, so crucial to the country’s story and so typical of it as well—without knowing or believing any of it. For how can anyone know or believe stories she dreamed in her sleep, information for which and to which she feels herself to be in no way responsible? A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside her skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life—the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives—as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

George Westinghouse entered the Pittsburgh natural-gas business in 1884, after he drilled a well on the grounds of his thirty-two-room mansion in the city’s prosperous Homewood district. He was not the first, but by 1889, the company he’d formed to exploit natural gas was the largest producer in the nation. To take the lead in distributing a new source of energy, Westinghouse had to invent the necessary technology. He patented twenty-eight inventions in his first two years of effort,

Natural gas reduced Pittsburgh coal consumption from three million tons annually in 1884 to one million tons later in the decade. Nearby gas supplies were limited, however, and as gas fields depleted, smoke pollution once again choked the city. “We are going back to smoke,” a speaker told the Pittsburgh Engineering Society in 1892. “We had four or five years of wonderful cleanliness in Pittsburgh, and we have all had a taste of knowing what it is to be clean.

I was where I needed to be. I wasn’t going to regret staying in Pittsburgh or taking the full-time job with Rye Publishing. I loved what I did, who I worked with, and how my future looked. I worked damn hard to make it to where I was. I knew going into my internship that the likelihood of me getting a full-time position was slim to none, and yet I’d impressed the shit out of them and landed a permanent spot. There were no regrets there. And, though I missed the surf, I really did love the city. I loved who I was becoming. Sure, I was lonely, but I had offers to go out — to make friends — I just had to start taking them. I could do that.