Leaving Baltimore? Not an option.

Now that both of my parents have passed on – my house paid for and my children long on their own and doing well – I could live anywhere in the world.

It’s something I have fantasized about a lot, especially in the last few years of caring for my elderly mother. The euphoric, wide-open freedom of anywhere!

From my grandfather’s village in Galicia, Spain to the beaches of Goa or the chance to sip Turkish coffee with Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, it’s all become possible as middle-age seeps into old.

But I choose to live in Baltimore – the City proper, the town where I was born when Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” topped the charts.

Am I a fool to stay?

I live in the house in Greektown where my father grew up before the 2nd World War; where his Italian aunts lived up and down the alley and the scent of garlic and simmering tomatoes perfumed the air. Dad’s best friends were his first cousins – friendships that lasted a lifetime – and if a relative was just over the city line in Dundalk it was considered a hike.

On Mom’s Polish side, we go back four generations to Old Canton and the 2700 block of Dillon Street where my cannery worker grandmother and her sisters lived next door and across the street from one another.

Most of my father’s relatives are in Harford County, now something of a second Highlandtown. Several of my mother’s nieces still consider themselves Baltimoreans but live in Pennsylvania. They have their reasons. Except for a second cousin whom I barely know, I’m the only one who remains.

When I speak of the privilege of living anywhere, I mean geography, not status. If I up and moved to Vietnam or Vicksburg I’d find a room with running water and internet within walking distance of a coffee shop and the post office.

My wife lives in a nice condo in Washington. I take the MARC train to be with her.

By the metrics of the fear-driven, postwar American dream, the decision of my friends and relatives to avoid Baltimore, much less live here, makes sense. It’s not easy to defend Baltimore and a few years ago I stopped getting into arguments about it. Like just about every big decision I’ve made – to get married at 22, become a writer, quit the Sunpapers at 42 to work on ships  – the choice is emotional.

When I lived in Los Angeles for five years writing for network TV, the money was good enough to get three kids through college and, if I’d wanted, buy a house. When my NBC contract wasn’t renewed after the ’07-’08 writers’ strike, I came back to the Greektown rowhouse I’ve known all my life and visited my parents for Sunday supper.

I’ve written about different aspects of this story often. Why revisit it now?

In late January – in a post tied to the 214th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe – a guy who writes for one of the same publications that I do published an essay about Baltimore headlined Grimy Margins and Losing Sides.

The author lives here and knows what he’s talking about. His piece wasn’t untrue; take a ride through the many marginalized neighborhoods in town and you’ll know it wasn’t. Just unkind. As the rabbis in Northwest Baltimore’s community of Orthodox Jews say, “Beware lashon hara.”

One of my favorite Baltimore stories comes from the filming of John Waters’ 1988 classic Hairspray in which the inimitable Pia Zadora has a bit part as a “beatnik chick.” While filming on location in a beleaguered neighborhood, Zadora complimented Waters on the realistic set.

To which the fabled director (who never left Crabtown for Tinseltown) replied, “Pia, this isn’t a set. People live here.”

Therein my response to the author’s notion that Baltimore – which he finds “magical” as though it were a rough neighborhood in Oz – is  “a slippery and somewhat seedy place, a city whose limelight tends to rest on history’s grimy margins and losing sides.” 

Aside from Poe and other ghosts of Baltimore past, his observations did not include people living here now. And that is where the true magic lies in the place Randy Newman described in song as “a hard town by the sea…”

All Baltimoreans – even some of the ones who have long moved away – are thin-skinned when it comes to home.

Newman released “Oh, Baltimore” in 1977. Then Mayor William Donald Schaefer (1921-2011) was not shy in saying he thought that it stunk. Said Newman, “I think people in Baltimore who objected to that song had a real good case because I didn’t know anything about it.”

Here are some of the people who make living in Baltimore — where I can walk from my front door to Greek and Italian and Latino restaurants that others drive miles to get to — more than worthwhile.  

Some are friends and, as of yesterday, still walking the streets looking for lucky, heads-up pennies like the ones left on Poe’s grave at Fayette and Greene.

Those same rabbis, whom I shadowed for several years as a Sun reporter, believe that the person who saves a single life has saved the entire world. In that spirit, for every one of the following good guys there are many hundreds more in the grimy margins of Crabtown, USA.

• Bruce White, one-time bad-ass pharmacy-robbing junkie who for 15 years has run one of the city’s more successful drug treatment centers.
• Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham, who opened Viva House Catholic Worker around the corner from H.L. Mencken’s home in 1968, the same year that Tio Pepe opened on Franklin Street. Now semi-retired from their lay ministry, the couple has provided corporal acts of mercy to hundreds of thousands.
• Jackie Oldham, editor, poet and folk singer. “I live in Lauraville and grew up all over the city but my first home was the [one time] St. Vincent’s orphanage on Division Street. I love Baltimore because of its ability to transcend the forces that try to divide us.”
• D. Watkins, essayist and memoirist D. Watkins who authored We Speak For Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress. As part of the city’s 61% African-American majority, Watkins writes, “I’m Black. Listen to me, respect me, and stop calling me BIPOC.”
• Rev. William J. Watters, S.J., who founded a trio of Jesuit schools for kids who grew up much like Watkins and, just short of 90-years-old, still celebrates Mass downtown.
• Jim Burger, photographer and bon vivant who landed here from Pittsburgh some 45 years ago to attend MICA. “Baltimore took me in without question,” he said. “It stole my heart.” His wife “Sweet Sue” cooks several turkey with all-the-trimmings each Christmas and “Burger” – without fanfare –delivers them to families who are grateful that guys like him still exist.
• The Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first order of African-American religious women in the United States. At Saint Frances Academy on East Chase Street, the Oblates give deserving kids an education that better-off kids in other neighborhoods might take for granted. They do so in the midtown shadow of the Maryland Penitentiary while championing the cause of their founder – Mother Mary Lange (1789-1882) – for sainthood.
• Greg Schwallenberg, the always affable baseball scholar and stadium vendor who once let me hold one of Babe Ruth’s bats. Greg is a glass half-full (of beer) mensch, the kind of guy everyone thinks of as their best friend. Schwallenberg runs with the Back on My Feet project of the Helping Up Mission in which the homeless get up early each morning to gain strength by traversing the same streets that led to their ruin.

I’ll end with a glimpse of the ways in which Baltimore breaks with public perception that overshadows reality, even when crime (serious and undeniable) is down as it’s been for the past year-and-a-half.

It comes from Danny C. Smith, a court liaison at Bruce White’s One Promise treatment center.

Smith lives in the historic Reservoir Hill neighborhood adjacent to Druid Hill Park where the tennis courts were desegregated in 1948 by young Black and Jewish players. His story occurred during widespread mayhem that followed the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

“They closed the [Circuit Court] because of the riots and I started driving home, not knowing what I might find,” said Smith, 68. “When I turned onto my street I saw this gang of guys in the middle of my block. I slowed down, thinking, ‘Okay, how you gonna handle this?’

“When I’m maybe 200 feet from my front door, I saw they were playing touch football in the street.” Bottom line: I like cities and this one happens to be mine.

Rafael Alvarez is at work on a book about the Rosary. If you have a good rosary story – or a string of beads to donate – contact Alvarez via orlo.leini@gmail.com