Sunset, Thursday, 27 August 2009 / Notes from Pittsburgh, Part 1

William Theodore Van Doren. Plum, Pa. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Sunset for Thursday the 27th was seen from Plum, Pennsylvania, the home of my Aunt Millie and where, as it turned out, we celebrated her 90th birthday, at a very strange restaurant called John Anthony’s. Millie lives on her own in the same little house she and her late husband bought from his employer, the coal company, back in 1950 or 1951. They’d been living in Plum and he’d been working in the mine for a few years before that.

Plum, technically, or postally, is part of Pittsburgh but in fact is an outlying eastern suburb.

The Plum sunset over the John Anthony’s parking lot indeed came in a variety of soft plum colors – mostly hazy blue cloud with some suggestions of red-violet and gold. Plumes of plum-colored smoke. That’s more interesting than it actually looked, but – isn’t that the point of writing?

We’d had tons of traffic trouble getting across Pittsburgh to our hotel on Neville Island, part of it because of unhelpful directions from Mapquest, part of it because of the usual tie-ups where Pittsburgh’s traffic narrows to get through tunnels (made necessary by the city’s formidable ridges), but most of it thanks to insane paving projects that stopped traffic on major streets during the afternoon rush hour.

When we mentioned these to Millie, she said, “Oh, that’s because they want to get all the potholes fixed before the G20.”

This was the first we’d heard about the G20 being in Pittsburgh. As the Huffington Post explained, back in May:

For years, political leaders, community activists and ordinary residents tried to convince the world beyond its three rivers that this former industrial powerhouse was on the rise with an economy built on higher education, medicine and new technology.

From September 24 to 25, [Pittsburgh] will get a chance to prove its point to the world leaders representing 85 percent of the world’s economy. ... The White House announced that President Barack Obama decided to host the next Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh as a way of illustrating what success can look like.

When I came back to the hotel this morning from my coffee run, I reported to Laura:

“On radio, on TV, everywhere, this town is obsessed with just one thing.”

“Oh ... the G20?”

“No – football!”