Home Is Where The Heart Is... On The Bus

What is home?  I mean for me.  Home is where I grew up: on the edge of a neighborhood called Westford Crossing adjacent to Beaver Creek.  A lot of you hear me call “The Hotel” home, my west coast Shangri-La. I know I tell my roommates all the time I will see them at home.  But for me, when people ask where I came from, where do I go when I “go home for the holidays,” I always say Philadelphia.

Now, I hold no grudge against either Harrisburg or Hershey where I spent my childhood.  I had neighborhood kids I hung out with, we regularly had neighborhood barbeques, I know I loved the swimming pool I spent every summer at from the age of six on up, and god bless wing nights.  Unfortunately, that place doesn’t exist anymore.  Thanks to wonderful urban sprawl, the farmland I used to ride my old Huffy mountain bike through is now covered in strip malls and town-homes.  It’s not the same place I grew up (except for the Eagle Hotel; it still has the best buffalo wings I’ve ever tasted). 

I always say I’m from Philadelphia because the person you know and love today is from that city.  I was Mike (god I hate that name) while growing up in the suburbs of Harrisburg, but once I got to high school and I began going by Mallick more and more, and then graduating and leaving that world behind when I went to college, that’s when I became the well-adjusted alcoholic you all know and love today. 

See, growing up with my folks and my sister, I was always in my parents house.  I grew up there, but it was their house, their rules.  Once I was away at college, I was on my own. 

Philadelphia is where I discovered all of the great music I am in tune with today.  It’s where I met my college buddies, some of the closest friends I have today.  It’s where I developed my ideas about religion, or lack there of.  It’s where my career in television began, and where it spring boarded with the help of a little town called West Chester.  From Big-5 basketball, to the Phillies and Eagles, to cheesesteaks, to the Schuylkill River, everything about Philadelphia is what shaped, and literally created, me.

I have always been of the school of thought, which believes a person is in constant flux.  The person I was in grade school is different from my high school persona, from my college party machine, from my young professional relationship in Philly, from the “adult” who now resides in Venice Beach.  Still, I feel the basic, underlying character was forged during my tenure in the city of brotherly love. 

Again, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t regret or loathe anything about the eighteen years I spent outside the “Sweetest Place on Earth”.  But each time I look toward home, back to where I came from, the memory, which always crosses my mind, is the picture of my life in Philadelphia.

I want you to show me the way…