Another American Adventure: A Pittsburgh Tour and Birthday

Sunday, August 29, 2010

A Pittsburgh Tour and Birthday

This weekend my sister, FA, and her husband, Joe, came to Pittsburgh to celebrate my birthday. We showed them the town, or what little we know of it. Next few posts will show some of what we did. We had the cake at the Original Fish Market restaurant, which is in downtown Pittsburgh. We had oysters, in honor of my Dad, who loved fresh oysters. I had Icelandic Arctic Char. Great restaurant - a bit pricey, but heck, I wasn't paying.

3 comments:

BarbaraAugust 29, 2010 at 10:33 AM
Arctic char -- yummmm!
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beth cioffolettiAugust 29, 2010 at 11:45 AM
yes!
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Sally ClayAugust 29, 2010 at 1:32 PM
Happy birthday, Beth!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.