Rittenhouse Square. August 17, 2007. Evening.

The streetlamps have just begun to turn on. A pigeon stirs, startling me, and I follow its flight over the trees to a balcony on a brick apartment building. Someone is growing a garden. Men with dreadlocks have begun playing bongos, a smiling couple shuffle home with their canes, and a man is talking to himself and forming words on the grass out of leaves. On the field next to where Jane and I sit on a park bench, Will’s plastic bat cracks as he hits the ball Travis has underhandedly thrown him. Will is learning to play baseball. The kid smacks five in a row, and a smiling crowd starts to assemble. Will laughs as he hits the ball into Travis’ stomach and Travis doubles over.

We walked to the art museum today. Travis loved the pop and modern art; I loved the Van Goghs and the Rodin statue and the 12th-century cloister fountain from Southwestern France; Will asked about all the Medieval crucifix paintings, loved the armor wing, and thought the knights were robots. He stood with his hands behind his back like a true aficionado, and, pretending to read the plaque, said, “This one is five pounds. Amazing.”

We covered Jane and Will in the stroller and walked home in a light summer rain, thunder rumbling distantly. Will asked me to tell him, for the thirtieth time, the story of Ben Franklin’s discovery of electricity. “I love electricity,” he said, at the end. He’d been fascinated by old Ben since we saw a gargantuan statue of him in the science museum. Says Ben’s a good thinker. The statue has been a favorite along with the planetarium, the Logan Square fountain that allows swimming and climbing on the huge water-spurting turtle and frog statues, the pigeons that in an almost alarming Hitchcock way flock to the bread we toss in the park, the construction workers eating lunch in a row ala Manhattan in the 1930s, the burrito joint down the street, the upscale neighborhood bakery, the butterfly exhibit, the Rodin museum, the French Second Empire styled City Hall with William Penn’s statue standing atop the dome and overlooking his city, the horsecarts, the street vendors, the cobblestoned streets, the cheesesteak sandwiches, the people reading on benches and blankets in the parks.

They are everywhere now. People, reading, walking to the French restaurant across the street, patting their dogs. At the corner of the square, a hotel has turned on white lights strung throughout its front trees and bushes, blinking from across the park like small reachable stars, as if a person, passing, could grab one for himself. Any person, no matter who. We are all reaching. If there is a fundamental commonality in all of the cities I’ve traveled to and lived in, it’s that we all want two things in our own ways: to find our version of happiness, and to matter. To us, happiness is Stanford, and California, and takeout over TV on Friday nights, and watching Jane learn how to cackle, and living with Superman, and finding new hip bands, and standing in front of a real Van Gogh. The Philadelphia chapter of our life is already at a close, and we are off to our next adventure. I can’t believe my luck in moving back to California, and yet—standing here under the light rain that has started up again—the city has begun to haunt me.