Intersection
Baltimore
2015
ZZ Packer and I had breakfast in a place on Charles Street that overlooked a parking lot where the Peabody Bookshop and Beer Stube once was, a hangout of Mencken. ZZ and I had both attended the Writing Seminars, years apart, and were back in town to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of our retired teacher’s ephemera at the Peabody Library. We compared our two Baltimore’s. I told her about Abe Sherman’s Bookstore, also gone, and the Owl Bar on the top of the Belvedere where Scott and Zelda drank. Of course, now Baltimore was the Baltimore of The Wire. But the row houses were still the rowhouses, rows and rows of rowhouses. She didn’t remember the Inner Harbor smelling of spices when McCormick’s factory still operated at the intersection of Pratt and Light. In the parking lot across Charles, an Arabber’s pony cart was setting up to sell produce from the Eastern Shore. After we talked about all the people we knew in common and the places we had both been but not at the same time, it was time to go and off we went.