Pittsburgh

I moved to Pittsburgh in 1993 to attend Carnegie Mellon University. I assumed that I would be there for 4 years, and then return to Kansas City. I enjoyed growing up in KC, and did not have any expectation about either liking or disliking Pittsburgh.

I ended up falling in love with Pittsburgh and lived there until 2002. Today, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an editorial by author and native yinzer Michael Chabon. Chabon talks about Obama, Roberto Clemente, racial reconciliation, and who we are as Americans. He ends his article expressing some of the things that I admire both about that city and about Obama.

I saw grace, the grace of Robinson and Clemente, in the way Mr. Obama balanced a steadfast refusal to surrender to anger with an equally staunch refusal to deny or repudiate its enduring legacy, for good and ill, in the history of race in America. There was grace in the intelligence and abandon of Robinson running the bases, in the fatal arc of a Clemente throw to home from deep right field, in the steadiness and candor that Mr. Obama brought to bear in making his difficult speech on race in America.

And there is grace in the fierce survival, down into this time of homogeneity and gentrification, of the Pittsburgh I remember, with its secret language and wildly manifest accent, its hill-and-hollow, mom-and-pop, ethnic crazy-quilt neighborhoods. As much as any other place in the country, Pittsburgh -- Polish, Italian, African, Jewish, Ukrainian, Scots-Irish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian and, more recently, Indian and Chinese, among others -- embodies and, more importantly, preserves, the spirit of "Out of many, one." The neighborhoods are still there, separated from each other by chasms and ridges and rivers; still linked, stitched up, bound together by 446 bridges.

It's in those bridges that the hope and the greatness of Pittsburgh lie. Though they were built to serve the needs of commerce and industry, other fundamental human needs -- for communication, for connection, for free passage through the world -- also drove their construction. As with courage, a beautifully engineered bridge such as Pittsburgh's Smithfield Street Bridge can be defined as grace under pressure, reconciling distances and bearing heavy loads with elegance and steel. Pittsburghers live in their neighborhoods, but they rely on the bridges they have built to teach them how to live together in their city, through a transfer of shared humanity, a mutual reaching toward the opposite shore.

Though there was mistrust and misunderstanding on both sides, and a certain necessary amount of forgetting, with the passage of time Clemente and the city of Pittsburgh built a bridge. They came to honor, respect and even treasure each other. Like the people of Pittsburgh, Barack Obama understands that we live in a Nation of Bridges -- his life and his history are the proof of it. In steel, stone or acts of human daring, that is the grace bestowed on all of us by those who, in spite of the terrible downward pressures of gravity, or bitterness, or fear, build bridges.