The Luck of the Draw

This column originally apeared on Sunday, April 13, 2008

You, the folks who live in Chester County who are reading this, don't know how lucky I am.

And by lucky I mean that it took unfathomable good fortune for me to be born and to grow up in Cincinnati, Ohio. That life was not foreordained. My mother was raised in small town Illinois; my father was born in Wisconsin. They met in New Jersey and were married when my father received his doctorate at Penn State. Somehow fate got them to Cincinnati and allowed my formative years to take place there.

According to one source, one's “formative years” are the time we acquire our adult personas as we move in stages from from childhood to adolescence. For example, the source states, in Hindu culture, during “upanayana, sometimes known outside India by the name, 'sacred thread ceremony,' children are taught the secret of life through Brahmopadesam (revealing the nature of Brahman, the Ultimate Reality) or the Gayatri mantra.” The child then becomes qualified for life as a student or adult, depending on his caste or walk in life.

Me, I just went to Skyline Chili.

I do not have to try very hard to capture in my mind the face of he waitress who served me my first portion of God's Greatest Gift to Food – the Skyline Coney. I don't, because she served me those same delights for two decades at the same chili parlor in Cincinnati, on Clifton and Ludlow, where we first encountered one another, until she retired. I didn't know her name and she didn't know mine, but she led me through the sacred ceremony of ordering “two up with mustard,” as respectfully as any guru would the Brahmopadesam.

That's where I grew up; that's where I learned to appreciate the fine things in life.

How lucky I was to spend those years learning how to eat the food of Nirvana from master teachers. The softness of the bun, the tang of the onion, the fluff of the grated cheese, the aroma of the chili sauce, all were as well known to me as the Torah is to any candidate for the Bar Mitzvah.

I tell you all these things because at this very moment I am less than a mile from that self-same chili parlor, and in several moments time, fate willing, I am going to walk into that parlor and order the Skyline meal I was brought up to receive and revere.

My meal will come after having spent the morning wallowing in the glory that are the other foods one can only truly find in Cincinnati. Shopping at the historic Findlay Market in the city's downtrodden downtown, I chose between hot beef metts and mild pork metts; between link bratwursts and old fashioned frankfurters; between garlic sausage and picnic hams. Today I passed on the smoked turkey necks out of a newly acquired mid-life appreciation for moderation. In my 20s, they'd have easily made the shopping cart.

My Cincinnati born-and-bred nieces, Emily and Alice, have chosen to lead vegetarian lives. Although I respect their freedom to make such choices, I sometimes wonder whether their parents should be investigated by the Hamilton County, Ohio, child welfare authorities for violations relating to culinary deprivation. But I let them slide, like a good hearted cop on the beat who looks the other way, knowing that the girls will still accompany their uncle to Skyline when he offers them a ride.

They know how lucky they are to sit in the Temple, whether or not they partake of the Ambrosia.

A Bank Shot

This appeared Oct. 1, 2006

The construction hole had been growing on the south side of the 400 block of East Market Street for weeks, and I had wondered what sort of business would be locating there. Art gallery? eBay outlet? Brian McFadden's mythical Fine Dining Restaurant?

Nope. According to the sign that went up the other day, we're getting another bank. Of course we are! Because if you live in Chester County in the early days of the 21st century, the two things you apparently cannot have enough of are ugly overpriced new homes and banks.

And if you live in West Chester you're spared the one, but inundated with the other.

You cannot spit in the business sector of West Chester without hitting the front door of a new bank. Anytime someone puts up a new building in the borough, the first thing you absolutely know is going to be located there is something requiring a vault and safe deposit boxes.

You can believe me or not.

It makes you recall the joke about the ubiquity of the Starbucks chain (an everywhere-ness that as of 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, 2006, still had not extended itself to the borough, I might add). Only instead of a new coffeehouse, in West Chester, we kid that they're opening a new bank in the men's room of an old bank.

Not that we even talk about it that much. It's a fact of life that you just accept without really thinking about it, like seeing discarded beer bottles in the parking lot of Lincoln Financial Field on Eagles game day.

But I know people who come in to work in West Chester every day who look at these financial institutions and just want to punch somebody wearing a three-piece suit. There's a secretary at the Chester County Courthouse who swears she can open a free checking account every 200 yards while taking a noon stroll on her lunch hour, but has to drive 10 miles to get a new pair of hose if she gets a run in her stocking.

It doesn't seem fair. I can list five things the borough needs more than another bank:

A tropical fish store.

A bike repair shop.

A camping equipment outlet.

A (bigger) used book store.

A Cincinnati-style chili parlor, preferably Skyline, that would be open 24/7/365 and would deliver free of charge to customers who can prove they were born in Ohio.

What do we need these banks for anyway? Technically speaking, I haven't seen the inside of a bank since the early days of the Clinton administration. I have direct deposit, I make withdrawals at the ATM, I pay my bills online, and I do my miscellaneous banking chores on my bank's Web site.

Does anyone actually go inside a bank anymore? For all I know, the banks that have been opening in West Chester might not even be banks. They could be insurance companies, or clandestine massage parlors.

It used to be that if you lived in West Chester you had the prefect ratio of banks to Chinese restaurants, which if I remember my notes from college is 4:1. Now we've gone way out of balance with banks and haven't made the necessary moral and financial commitment to keep up the pace with the Chinese restaurants. I say if the Borough Council is going start tackling quality of life issues, that's one they should start with - not this height issue thing.

I have spent countless hours of my personal time trying to come up with a town motto that would serve West Chester now that the original one - "West Chester: The Athens of Pennsylvania" has been discarded I've described them here: "Come Grab Our Trash;" "More Bars Than Barbers" and "Don't Worry, Coatesville is 10 Miles to the West." None have seemed to resonate with the public, or gotten me noticed by the folks on Madison Avenue. Until now.

How about it? "West Chester: A Town Willie Sutton Would Love."