The Ghost of Broad Street

I sit at the dock of the river, at the end of my walk, watching the dark water run slowly and thinking of Ben Franklin. He loved this river, swam here for relaxation, perhaps invented swim fins right here. He liked to walk. He walked across New Jersey on his way to Philly when he was 17, and then took a boat across the Delaware. If the Quakers gave us whatever tolerance we possess, Ben Franklin gave us nearly everything else: literacy, humor, a journalistic tradition, an entrepreneurial spirit, a scientific curiosity, a taste for lager, an active libido, and a good part of the Declaration of Independence. He would have welcomed the Internet and owned part of Comcast today. Except he died a long while ago, on April 17th, the same time and on the same day I was born, about a century and a half apart.

A harmonious multitude — that’s what Franklin was called and what I have just walked through. Philadelphians from Guyana and China and India, first-generation and fifth-generation Philadelphians, pioneers and dying breeds, with accents from 5,000 miles away and from 5th and Shunk. Cities are an extension of the people who build them and occupy them and make them click. I need not move back, nor fret about doing so. Philadelphia courses through my body as surely as Broad Street runs through the heart of Philadelphia.

The walk was so energizing, so calming, that come tomorrow morning, I’ll head back in the other direction, cover the same 13 miles of 14th Street, this time stopping to see Joe Frazier’s gym and the Wilma Theatre and a buddy at the Inquirer and maybe stop by my mother’s old apartment building, say hello to her friends.