We went back east for Beanie's graduation from Rutgers Law (Camden). It was a chance for Andrew to celebrate with his family and also a kind of trial travel to see how well we held up flying and traveling from place to place. All other travel we have done together has been short jaunts or else a road trip or a trip to Hawaii, which is not quite the same as planning multiple-leg flights and train travel and crashing on couches and navigating hardly known cities on public transportation. The plan: Philly for 2.5 days, Brooklyn/Manhatten for 3 days, and Washington, D.C. for 4.

I know Philly a little bit, can drive around there, take the train there, walk and find things I saw before. But there's infinitely more than that.

Beanie picked us up in her Cadillac, a 90s version in white and leather (or faux leather) with a palatial back seat. The thing has an automated hook that reaches up and pulls down and seals the trunk so you don't have to slam it.

She took us to Reading (read: Reading) Terminal for a quick, cheap breakfast—the kind of treat us Seattleites don't often get. It was Dutch Eating Place. Women in folded paper-stiff white fabric hats darted from one side of the U-shaped counter to the other. You pull up swiftly, order as you sit, eat, and pay quickly so that the person standing behind you can sit. We did that. Eggs and toast and potatoes for something like three bucks.

In the evening Beanie drove us across town to see Angela, who lives near Penn. I haven't seen her in a year, not since she moved from our neighborhood. To be like old times, we ran together. She has a route she likes that traverses the campus (down that center lane, which I've walked before) out onto Walnut and across the Schuylkill. Then, on the city center side of the bridge, you can descend to the river bank, where a park with running trails and other landscaping designs of leisure stretch at least as far as the museum, if not farther. We ran along the recovering river until the museum, turned around, and ran back the way we came. Clothes and other particles of subcivilian living creep over the fences and concrete walls that mark the perimeter of recent gentrification. It's just barely in recess and allotted no new space, so it stays strained along the newly advanced class seam.

We ate dinner in her neighborhood at a place that used to be an old corner drug store that now serves only organically grown food. We loved the food and catching up with her. And then, while we waited for the Cadillac to make it back across town, we three and Elliot the cat crashed out on Angela's bed. She has high ceilings and an ornate other-century fire place. Long wooden floors and generous bay windows. A vast kitchen. The bathroom, as expected, was an afterthought, tucked into a wide spot in the hallway and barely there.

Beanie lives in downtown Camden in some unbelievably old structure that has been not just spared but renovated. It looks up to the Ben Franklin bridge and to downtown. Around it are a few like structures and empty lots where grass grows and cats play. Beyond, some sports stadiums and the school and the decaying vestiges of industry, the abandoned wherewithal.

In all other visits to the east coast I tried to imagine how so many large factories and the land they occupy could be left empty to rot. Do we have that kind of space to waste? I could not imagine the why or the why still. But this time I knew as if always knowing (and marveled that once I didn't) that these were the relics of self-sufficiency. That the nation's infrastructure, which we treat as if a bedrock, originated in these enormous brick carapaces, themselves given by individual hands. Traveling by them, I had the feeling that the cord had been cut and we now drift free with some naïve certainty that either what we have will endure or that whatever is needed can be procured elsewhere.

For celebrations we ate at Marrakesh near South street, digging palm-deep into each dish. One morning we ventured to South Philly for brunch near the Italian market. Andrew stopped to help an old lady who had lost some coins to a newspaper machine. She tugged at the door feebly and condemned it as a "money-stealer." She declared, "I'd break it but there's a cop right over there." A passing guy corrected her: "That's not a cop, that's a security guard." Now when I want a laugh, I ask Andrew to recite that exchange in his best South Philly accent.