#teavolve

I tend to fall in love with cities.

Baltimore and I have a history that goes way back, starting with the obligatory east coast childhood visits to their spectacular aquarium. I remember treading carefully through rows and ramps of fish and strange underwater sights, feeling more and more submerged as we moved upward through the exhibits; that moment of wonder and contrast as deep blue turned to bright sunlight as I wandered into the top floor rainforest canopy.

As a teenager, I made yearly trips to the city for a youth conference held at the convention center downtown. I heard speakers and bands and lights and music and all of the whistling, whirring machinery of the early 2000s Christian culture marketing machine.

The music I recall the most from those trips? Drummers on the streets of the inner harbor pounding away on garbage cans and chemical barrels and anything resembling an instrument. A jazz/fusion band that stopped me in my tracks during a lunch break at Lexington Market, pushing aside all of the glorious smells and sounds of that place, squashing (for a moment) the insatiable hunger of a teenage boy. I watched these musicians casually and calmly rip through solos and whirling melodies. Later, I couldn’t believe that they had no recorded music to their name, and unsuccessfully searched for “The _______ Project” occasionally over the next year, hoping to find something to bring me back to the food court at Lexington.

Right before graduating high school, my senior class ventured around the bay on the BCS traditional sailing trip with my former administrator and his wife. Aside from the astonishing realization that a wry sense of humor and a persona beyond the scary/mysterious disciplinarian existed within Mr. Becker, I discovered the immensity of that body of water and its countless harbors and neighborhoods.

Nights on the bay, sneaking in the sporadic quiet moment or two of profundity among the usual clamor and chatter of my classmates and I saying and doing ridiculous things. Every time I visit Baltimore, I return to that week on and off the water.

I’m drawn to the lights reflecting off the dark beneath the docks at Fells Point, just glimpses in the cold January night, as we made our way into an Irish pub (Slainte) on Friday night. I tried an unusual dish that fused Irish and Korean food (corned beef and kimchi?!), correctly trusting the chef and the recommendation of my father (via Guy Fieri).

Saturday provided brunch at Miss Shirley’s (chicken and waffles for me) and a walk through Federal Hill on a gorgeous and warm winter day before a stop at the American Visionary Art Museum. Saturday evening? Games and hanging with friends who live in a neighborhood a few miles west of Rachel’s brother’s apartment.

My caffeine-fueled Internet research provided the inevitable tea shop on Sunday morning, always a priority Google when I’m spending more than a day in a location. Teavolve (can’t decide if I love or hate this pun) provided the drinks en route to The Book Thing, which is in itself reason enough to travel to Baltimore on the weekend.

A run-down series of rooms, full of sagging ceiling tiles giving up the melting snow into carefully placed buckets, contains thousands of free books. There’s no catch.  Wander the shelves, somewhat arranged by genre but certainly not by author or alphabetized, and take what you want. On the way out, a series of clipboards seek your signature and the number of books you rescued.

Me? I took nine: all hardcover editions of works by authors that I knew, somehow resisting the temptation to grab some unknowns to check out.

And that brings me to one of Baltimore’s antiquated mottos: The City That Reads. A song I referenced in my previous post draws its title from the old slogan and I couldn’t help but hear the opening lyrics echo through my head most of the weekend:

Baltimore’s quiet and cold There’s no ship in the bay to take me back home for the holiday.

Yeah, it’s an emo anthem, and yeah, it activates my nostalgia for the old Calling Out Closer tours, falling in love with a different city or town each night. Baltimore itself, with a stronger pull to my own past than I would have guessed for a city I never lived in, seems to have had that nostalgia effect on these boys from the Midwest as well.

And yet, each time I return, memories are updated and retinted with the adventures of the current visit, including this weekend’s awesome moments spent with my fiance and her brother, wandering through places old and new, creating a brand new layer of glass to peer into my next affair with this town on the bay.