Delaware Travelogue

I'm at my grandfather's house in Wilmington right now. I flew here to celebrate my grandfather's 80th birthday with him and some extended family. As my brother pointed out to me earlier today, this house is the one location that has stayed constant throughout our lives, as I, my brother, our parents, and my father's siblings' families have all repeatedly moved to new homes all across the country.

I flew into Philadelphia Saturday afternoon, where my aunt and my brother picked me up. On the way to Wilmington we stopped in Elsmere to get subs at Casapulla's, a deli that was a family favorite during my childhood in DE, and since then has become like a legendary and venerable icon of our Reagan 80's childhood, living in newly-built subdivisions, surrounded by the families of Italian bankers transplanted from New York to fill positions at the burgeoning MBNA. My brother and I resolved to split a 12" Italian sub with oil and vinegar, "everything," plus pickles and sweet peppers, and a 6" cheesesteak with grilled onions and mushrooms--and sweet peppers. Back at the house, everybody kept repeating the obvious--that it was impossible to get an Italian sub this good west of the Allegheny.

Saturday night my brother and I went to a birthday dinner for my grandfather at a seafood place in downtown Wilmington, near the train station with my aunt, my uncle from Orange County, and my uncle from New York and his family. The place was big conglomerate of restaurants where downtown wearhouses used to be, and it reminded me of the flats in Cleveland. There we all grinned encouragingly at my uncle from NY's daughter who, at age 16, politely declines to eat practically anything besides french fries, speghetti or boiled white rice. She's the first blonde blood member of our family of brown-eyed Scots, and we seem to agree that she's smarter than all of us (she is) and should be able to do whatever she wants.

That night my brother and I sat up together here at my grandfather's house, hours after everybody else had gone to sleep, drank enough coffee for it to be mind-altering, and talked about how awesome it is that this house--and to a great extent this whole town--hasn't changed at all since we were young children. The same 2" blue pinbacks that read "Reagan For President" and "Reagan Bush" are stuck to corkboard in the laundry room; the family still eats at Casapulla's and The Charcoal Pit (sort of the Chicago's Pizza and El Cid of Wilmington, DE) whenever possible; and--believe it or not--they are still doing the same construction on the Philadelphia airport they were doing when we were in grade school.

This morning I slept in as my uncle from NY steadily corralled his family into their car so that he could get them back to Battery Park before he had to fly to LA for business. I moved into the back bedroom--where they had been before they packed up--and fell asleep, feeling somewhat guilty becuase I had promised my grandfather I would take him to church. When I finally did get up--after 12 noon--my brother was famished, so I drove him around the corner to The Charcoal Pit. I hadn't been there since I was maybe 7 or 8, but my brother ate there yesterday or Friday. We ate the huge burgers at our little table by a little table-side juke box and I imagined that the teen girls who waited the tables were the kind of girls I would have been attracted to if I had stayed in DE and gone to Tatnall. My brother--a transplant to New York--was bemoaning how this is supposed to be the last season for Coney Island, and someone is supposed to turn the place into a Nickelodean-themed amusement park.

When my brother and I got back to my grandfather's house, my uncle from Orange County and my aunt had just arrived with coffee and with a sub from Wa Wa (a convenience store common in DE). My brother and were skeptical about buying a sub from a convenience store, but my uncle assured us that a convenience store sub in DE was still way better than any sub you can get in Orange County. Later in the afternoon my brother become determined to get subs at Casapulla's again. So we drove to Elsmere, but once we got there Casapulla's was closed. Now quite hungry, we racked our brains for dining options in this town we haven't lived in since the age of 10. Finally, it dawned on me that Pat's Pizzeria, which was right on the way back to the house, makes a pretty good Italian sub.

Earlier this evening, with my uncle from Orange County as my co-pilot, I drove my brother to the train station in Wilmington to put him on a train back to NYC. Since we arrived early we sat with him on the platform and my uncle told us a hilarious story about the time he blew out the engine in his VW Bug driving from Evanston to West LaFayette, IN while my uncle was going to Northwestern and my dad to Purdue. As we put my brother on the train, I told my uncle how much I hate Amtrak, but I was struck by how this old town where I grew up is so easily connected to New York by train and Chicago by air and that in some way this location can still be central in our family's collective life, even when almost none of us live here.