I’m proud of growing up in the Glass City

I am often asked where I am from. During an interview for a potential job, or at an exceptionally stale social function. By a professor, or on a date. Sometimes my admission rouses the features of my cohort in conversation with unmistakable familiarity. Other times, it elicits a slight shake of the head and a tactful response about maybe, possibly passing through it on a road trip once.

In the past several years, I began to notice that nearly every time I told people where I am from, I delivered, “Toledo,” as though it were a punch line.

In December of 2013, when ‘You Will Do Better in Toledo,’ became the city’s official slogan and sparked a full-scale social media movement of posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, I admittedly guffawed at it. Even more so when it was emblazoned on t-shirts, baby onesies, baseball caps, Christmas tree ornaments, shot glasses, even bags of coffee beans.

The inspiration for the city’s tag line: A massive lighted sign presented to the city by the Toledo Railways & Light Co. in 1913

Growing up in the Northwest Ohio city, I cannot say that I ever anticipated a day in which I would willingly support what has become a prized proverb to natives. As a teenager, I regarded Toledo only as a nationally known hub for human trafficking, increasing gang violence, and a really shitty mall. Yet, as soon as I went away to university, I began to view the place of my upbringing differently. Perhaps it was simply a case of nostalgia, but each time I returned home from school to the place where I found my feet, I could not help but take pleasure in summoning to mind the ghosts of my past and the memories I was convinced I would one day replace with shinier ones.

Wildwood Metropark single-handedly sustained my sanity throughout high school

I think of my mother’s promises of joining me for a walk at Wildwood park if I survived another day of high school hell. I think of Penguin Palace, an oasis at the center of the sweltering Midwest summer heat, and strawberry sherbet’s slow descent down my hand. I think of a very underage me, swilling lukewarm beer from the bottle and swearing like a sailor at Shawn’s Irish Tavern. I think of my first kiss at the loading dock of my grade school parking lot. I think of the Toledo Museum of Art and its inhabitants, who have figuratively held my hand and breathed life back into my being following every bad breakup I have ever had. I think of the mornings when I would awake just in time to see my father creep into the kitchen with a bag of fresh bagels from Barry’s. I think of wearing a bikini to Lickity Split in the springtime because a boy I liked worked behind the counter. I think of weeping like an infant with acute colic in the backseat of our car, somewhere between my mini fridge and collapsible hamper, the morning I left for university. I think of breaking my own promise never to look back.

I have been fortunate enough to pay a visit to some of the best museums in the world. Yet they somehow never quite come close to the Toledo Museum of Art

When I was just a little girl, I could have never imagined that when I did eventually find a way out, I would spend much of my young adult years looking for a way back in. I can remember reluctantly donning the forest green plaid of St. Patrick of Heatherdowns grade school, and when it came time, traded the juvenalian jumper of my pre-pubescence for the navy kilt of St. Ursula Academy for girls, my high school alma mater and rival school to that of Katie Holmes,’ Notre Dame Academy. Like many of my classmates, I was rarely a resident of the real world. My daydreams were both my saving grace, and my social currency. In those days, the vast majority of my peers and I were all plotting our exodus from ennui.

Even years after the fact, I can still hear the collective sigh of the student body when the location of junior prom was announced as the Toledo Zoo. Instead of acknowledging the fact that our zoo had been ranked as one of the best in the nation, we were all disillusioned by its apparent lack of sophistication. Though we could hardly be considered the presiders of posh, all fascination was lost in a reality that did not reek of romance.

A whole host of hopeful Toledo escapees at graduation

Now, I often wonder whether we were all far too intoxicated by the notion of becoming more than just small-town girls with big-city dreams to appreciate the ‘small town,’ itself. I like to think that if we had had the knowledge that life was never going to be as simple as it was when we were full-time Toledo residents, we would have savored the school-sponsored functions and the city’s available settings for social gatherings.

At twenty-two, I have only just recently realized that Toledo is more than the punch line I once believed it to be. It is the place that has birthed icons like Gloria Steinem and Jamie Farr, and the home of the Libbey glass factory. It’s the place where my grandfather was a long-time reporter for the local newspaper. It is the place where nearly every member of my family has remained. It is the place that has always accepted my attempts at the best, and made them infinitely better than they might have been anywhere else. It is home. I just wish I would have realized it before I decided to leave it.