Excavating Towerlawn Drive, part 1

I.

We landed in Pittsburgh from LA to heavy rainfall. Although I swore, after living in Victoria, BC for twelve years, I never wanted to see another drop of rain, and although LA was doing its best to fulfill that wish, the rain was refreshing. It seemed opulent. Nature’s parsimony in LA is severe, and the rain felt like a great generosity. We came out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, the glory of The Point before us, quintessential American architecture rising elegantly, full of aspiration, glistening in the evening downpour. And there below, the rivers! What abundance and restrained power. The shuttle driver groaned. “This rain’s killin’ me! Goddam rain forest.”

I suppose when Layard realized he’d found the treasure he’d been seeking, and Nineveh’s bricks and crumbled mortar and cylinder seals drizzled with the sand out of his crew’s shovels, he imagined, among a myriad images of kings and chariots and palace walls and golden idols, a mighty Tigris feeding and flooding the land. What wonders, and what wondrous little remains of that mighty city-state. Even its river is but a shallow stream now.

Every little crick (that’s how we say “creek” in the ’burgh) was swollen and cascading its way to Pittsburgh’s three rivers, all visible as we crossed the Fort Pitt Bridge. Across the bridge, the Parkway turns east, parallels the Mon (Pitt-talk for the Monongahela River) briefly as it passes through downtown, then bores through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. After the tunnel, Regent Park and Swissvale and the arrows to Kennywood, then up the hill past Wilkinsburg to Churchill, where we cut off the Parkway East into Penn Hills.

Penn Hills is one of those dreary places where Pittsburgh’s working class spread out to build their dreams of economic prosperity, but were mostly dragged down in burdensome routines of small business and trades, while America turned away from steel and smoke stack. We turned into Eastmont, a Western PA Levittown with four cookie cutter house plans laid out in enervating regularity, street after deadening street. My aunt and uncle bought their brick, 900 sq.ft. house in 1955 for about ten thousand bucks. It’s not worth much more now, and that’s where the shuttle stopped. My aunt greeted us with a big hug and laughter. She remembers very little of what went on an hour, a day, or a month ago, but she still knows us well. As Babylon, her memory is increasingly obscured and buried under a mound, her rivers drying out, her forceful personality gone, never to be excavated. My beloved aunt.

We picked up my dad’s car that had to be hidden from the greedy stepmother. The wicked stepmother fable has new meaning to me now. A beat-up ’94 Cutlass station wagon with an out of date registration, but it turned over, and we drove the final stretch to Monroeville and arrived at the mound, the tell where my mother and father built their tiny empire. But the mighty have fallen, first queen, then king, and now three millennia later, three months by calendrical reckoning, my wife and I have come to excavate, not for fame and fortune and the pursuit of grand mythologies like Nineveh’s numerous archeologists, but out of love and sorrow and necessity, and to bring to conclusion two lives, so seemingly well known, already so covered by drifting sands.