Why Did the Cockroach Cross the Road?

As I sit by the pool in sunny Nashville, my mind wanders back to Philadelphia.

Today my sister-in-law and brother are packing up their house in downtown Philadelphia and moving to Phoenix. I’ve been texting with her all morning, convincing her it’s the right thing to do, it’s a new adventure, and she should be excited. She’s not so excited…

In a last ditch effort to distract her from the move, I tell her about something that happened to me when I was in Philadelphia last week.

We were driving home from dinner one night after the show when we stopped at a red light. The sign on the sidewalk blinked the white person signifying that was safe to cross and out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving in the crosswalk.

Rob was talking, but I wasn’t really listening; I was concentrating on this thing crossing the street. I watched a man on the corner throw a crumpled paper at it and it just scurried along, trying it’s best to make it across the street before the light turned green.

I rolled down my window and stuck my head out to get a better look. It was a cockroach the size of a small child crossing in the crosswalk, just like he knew what he was doing, like he belong there and was just following the rules.

It was the biggest cockroach I had ever seen in my entire life and I instantly felt like our car was covered in them. I even swore I heard crunching under our tires when the light turned green and we drove across the crosswalk.

Like every city we work in, Rob and I ask the question, “Could we live here?” We were actually having that very conversation when I saw the childlike cockroach crossing the street. My answer was immediately NO! It was no for a number of reasons, but the number one reason was I didn’t want to live in a city where cockroaches knew and obeyed the laws of Sesame Street and crossed at the light.

As we were driving home to Nashville, we stopped for the day in New York. I had never been a fan of New York City. It intimated me, I never felt like I belonged, and always felt severely out of place, but this time was different; I loved it.

After Rob’s meeting we were in a car going to get some dinner and I said to him, “I think I could move here.” He was delighted, because he had been saying the same thing for months. By the time we were eating dinner, we were looking up apartments in the city and I was concocting a story to tell the kids. That’s when my sister-in-law told me a story about her friend who moved to New York City. She was on her bed and a rat the size of a cat fell out of the ceiling and landed on her. There went my desire to want to live in New York City.

The next day we got home to Nashville and while it was amazing to be sitting on my own couch, drinking coffee out of my favorite mug, having just woken up from sleeping in my own bed, Nashville seemed small, almost country like, but it also felt like home. It felt cockroach and rat free and while I’m certain both types of vermin live in Nashville, they have the Southern charm about them and stay well hidden from view.