Showing around your hometown to a friend visiting from afar is one of those things that can reveal a lot about a person. Your bedroom, your teenaged adornments and accoutrements, your parents house, your pets, the food you cook and how you do it, your neighborhood, the places where you used to engage in illicit activities, the places you hung around when you were younger and sober and did weirder shit unselfconsciously than you did as the maladjusted teen you grew into who longed to be anywhere else, and the small things you’d never thought you’d miss when you did get out and saw the world a bit. And by ‘you’ I guess I mostly mean ‘me’.

Lauren pointed out these things to me while walking around her hometown in suburban Philadelphia. Pennsylvania, a state I’d never thought much of until I went on a road trip earlier this year and realized what a beautiful place it was (except Harrisburg, fuck Harrisburg, Harrisburg cost me a night in a hotel and 7-11 cuisine). Philadelphia is full of public art: sculptures and murals everywhere. In Lauren’s hometown, I noticed the cracked but neat sidewalks, the convenience stores advertising something called a “hoagie” and selling vices with considerably lower taxes than back up in New England. Then there’s the architecture. Each place has a distinct look yet retains some degree of familiarity wherever I go. Montreal’s got plexes, Boston’s got triple deckers, and Philadelphia’s got these old old brick row houses that are all decorated differently. Her neighborhood was made of these old brick houses which look more like pictures of houses in English suburbs than anything I’d imagined being in America. Her dad said, “Our town is three things: old brick houses, convenience stores, and Catholic churches.” Behind one of the many churches, Lauren pointed out the clothing donation dumpster where she and her friends had spent afternoons diving into when they were in middle school. And then there was Wawa. She and her mother were somewhat appalled that I had yet to experience the greatness that is Wawa and hoagies you can custom order on a touch screen. And you know what, they’re great. Especially when you load them up with sharp cheddar and pungent vegetables.

Lauren said: “I feel like people might understand me better if they see could this, where I'm from: brick houses, neighbors, Wawa, hoagies, Catholic churches, murals. I am all these things.”