City Rituals

Most days I walk. Center City is about a twenty-minute walk, and the 33 bus takes about as long, so I usually walk unless I'm carrying too much.

The buses are frequently late. The tracking on the SEPTA website is very accurate (which is to say, it accurately reports where the bus is, even when where the bus is doesn't match the schedule). The schedule is the fiction. The tracking is the truth. I've learned to trust the tracking and ignore the schedule, which is a workaround that shouldn't be necessary but is.

What I've also noticed, in three years of riding: the buses are usually clean. The drivers are professional. Not warm, exactly (they're doing a difficult job under difficult conditions), but professional, which means they do the thing and you go where you're going and nobody loses their temper or makes it weird. And I've regularly seen people giving up seats for elderly passengers and pregnant women, which is the kind of small civility that doesn't get reported but is actually what makes transit feel like part of the city rather than apart from it.

The Library

The Spring Garden branch of the Free Library is a five-minute walk from my house. My son goes with his nanny most weekdays. I show up on Saturdays when I can, which is maybe once or twice a month. We do the children's area, we do story time if we're there at the right hour, we walk around and let him pull books off shelves and put them back wrong and run between the aisles with the particular energy of a small person in a large space full of things to touch.

The library is the place that made me feel like I lived in the neighborhood before I knew anyone in the neighborhood. You go there enough times and you start recognizing the same people (the other nannies, the grandparents with small kids, the regulars in the adult section who are there every Tuesday and Thursday like it was an appointment they made years ago and never cancelled). It has the texture of a place that people actually use, which sounds like a low bar and isn't.

Tuesday Mornings Near the Zoo

On Tuesday mornings I run with the Fairmount Running Club. We meet at 6:30 in front of Eastern State Penitentiary, cross the Girard Bridge, run past the zoo entrance, down the west side of the Schuylkill, and finish at the Rocky Museum. It's about three and a half miles.

The club also holds a Monday coffee run on a different route, which I do often, and a new Friday morning run that I haven't been on. The Friday route isn't stroller-friendly, and I mostly run with a baby stroller these days, so Friday's the one I skip. The group has been meeting for longer than I've lived here, and I've been showing up for three years. Same faces, same route, same attitude about the weather (we complain about it constantly and show up anyway). It's the kind of thing that makes a neighborhood feel like a place: the knowledge that every Tuesday at 6:30, there's a group of people in front of Eastern State, and they'll wait for you if you're a few minutes late.

Tuesday Nights at the Bourse

For the two years before my son was born, I went almost every Tuesday to a board game meetup at the Bourse Food Hall, in Old City. The format was a two-hour session. The first half hour was the part I liked most: a free-for-all in which small groups of five to ten people would break off, pull random games off the shelf that nobody had heard of, and just figure them out together. The remaining ninety minutes was Blood on the Clocktower (a social deduction game, a kind of grown-up Werewolf, in which the whole group plays one story and you have to figure out who's lying). It was a meetup group, which is the only reason I ever ended up in Old City on a Tuesday night.

It had the same texture as the running club. Same faces, mostly. Same evening, same two hours, same rhythm of showing up and figuring out who was there this week. I didn't think of it as a ritual when I was doing it (I just kept going), but the ritual is exactly what it was, and it's the reason I know the layout of the Bourse even though I haven't been back since my son arrived.

The Ritual of Arrival

I moved to Philadelphia in 2022. The first year was mostly figuring out which parts of the city were mine (which routes, which stores, which corners, which hours). The bus routes I use most. The library as a default Saturday destination. The running route that starts at my door and ends at the zoo and back.

These are rituals. Not in the religious sense. In the practical sense. They're the things that happen repeatedly, the things I don't have to think about, the things that structure time in a way that gives it shape. A week has Tuesdays. Tuesdays have 6:30am runs, and Tuesdays have the Bourse. Saturdays have the library. The city would exist without these rituals. But they make it exist for me in a different way (not as a place I live but as a place I have a pattern in), and patterns are how you turn an address into a home.

I didn't plan any of this. I just kept showing up and eventually the showing up became the thing, and the thing became a reason to keep showing up.