I met John’s parents long before he met mine. They were both teachers, she a history teacher at the archrival of the high school I had attended, and he a biology teacher at the Community College of Philadelphia. They both hailed originally from northeast Philly, part of the entrenched Irish community, but moved to Center City in the early ’70s. I know they didn’t really like South Philly, maybe because of the immigrant communities that turned street corners into gathering places and where a row home often housed four families. South Philly consisted of a steady stream of Irish who hadn’t ever stopped arriving, even decades after the potato famine; the Italians, mostly from Sicily, who invariably set up pizzerias, selling tomato pies they never consumed at home but which they learned was apparently very Italian; the Vietnamese, who pooled together the money of several families and bought and managed Chinese food shops and restaurants, because nobody seemed to notice the difference and because most people still felt pissed about the war.

“So I guess my parents are stereotypically boring people,” John told me one night at the used bookstore on South Street, where we used to meet. It was the night I was going to meet his parents, and he wanted to fill in the background of details, the context of how he came to be. “So they may be curious and ask you lots of questions because you’re ethnic …”

I stifled a laugh. I couldn’t help it.

“What’s so funny?”

“I just hate that word. ‘Ethnic.’”

“It’s a fine word,” he said defensively.

He asked if I wanted to go now, since his mother was making dinner at six o’clock. But I preferred to stay a while longer at the bookstore, just a few more minutes to brace myself. John said, “Sure,” and headed up to the second floor to check out the sociology books. He could read a book in just a few days, or even several hours, which amazed me. I’d decided to drop out of college soon after I got an “F” on an English Composition 102 paper. The instructor, who was just a teaching assistant anyway, wrote something like “Poor organization” or “Doesn’t address the point of the assignment.” Of course it didn’t, because I never understood the goddamn assignment in the first place. How should I know or care to know how to write a comparison and contrast of two poems? Of Robert Frost, no less? “Swinger of Birches,” my ass. In Philly we called trees “trees”—just that. Nothing more specific beyond that because there were not enough of them populating the streets to warrant naming them individually. A tree, growing fragilely out of a square of uncemented sidewalk, is just a tree.