I rented a car to move apartments. Naturally, this became a weekend in Philadelphia involving Jorja Smith, seventy-two museum steps, a flower show I did not know existed, and several decisions only loosely related to moving.

My trip to Philadelphia began with a moving problem.

This is how many good ideas arrive: disguised as logistics.

I was moving to Fort Lee on a Friday. I did not have enough belongings to justify hiring an entire moving operation, but I had too many to carry around personally without developing a permanent resentment toward furniture.

A U-Haul was an option.

Movers were an option.

Both required either more energy or more money than I wanted to provide.

So I rented a car.

The rental period ran from Friday through Monday.

And once you possess a rental car for an entire weekend, an important question presents itself:

Are you really going to use it only for moving?

Obviously not.

Philadelphia was close enough.

I had not been since 2022.

Problem solved.

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The last time I went to Philadelphia, I travelled with friends.

That trip survives in my memory as a series of small disasters that were, for precisely that reason, perfect.

I barely ate cheesesteaks at the time and somehow became evangelical about one.

A friend practically lay on the pavement to find flattering camera angles for me.

It rained.

We had no umbrellas.

I put a CVS bag on my head and prepared to run, at which point nearby strangers praised the innovation with enough enthusiasm to suggest I had solved weather.

Hair came undone.

Ice cream melted.

Everything was excellent.

Three years later, I returned alone.

Traveling alone changes the geometry of a city.

Nobody asks whether you are tired.

Nobody objects when you add another museum.

Nobody is there to stop you from scheduling activities close enough together that the day begins to resemble a military exercise.

Freedom is wonderful.

Freedom also has no one checking the itinerary.

My first major plan was a Jorja Smith concert at the Met Philadelphia.

I knew exactly one song.

This did not seem like a problem.

The song was “On My Mind,” a track I associated with electronic production and club energy, so I had constructed an entire imaginary concert around that expectation: remixes, machines, bass, perhaps some elaborate manipulation of sound.

Instead, Jorja Smith sang.

Really sang.

There was a choir.

There was soul.

There were voices operating at levels of competence that made my anticipated electronic spectacle seem slightly adolescent.

I had arrived expecting production.

The production turned out to be a human throat.

This is one of the nicer ways to be wrong.

Parking, however, was terrible.

At some point the search became so prolonged that I had to refuel the car.

I would see Jorja Smith again.

I would not necessarily see her again at the Met Philadelphia if I had to drive there.

Art has limits.

Parking defines them.

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The next day I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has the useful quality of looking important before you even enter it.

The building sits high enough above the city that Philadelphia becomes part of the exhibit.

You climb the steps, turn around, and immediately understand why people keep photographing themselves there.

Inside, I did what I increasingly do in large museums: stopped trying to behave as though I were preparing for an exam.

I looked.

I moved on.

I stopped when something held me.

I moved again when it did not.

This is a much better system than attempting intellectual devotion to every rectangular object on a wall.

The museum felt calmer and less heavily trafficked than MoMA, or at least less aggressively processed by visitors. The galleries seemed cleaner, quieter, slightly less handled by the collective anxiety of cultural tourism.

One artist who stayed with me was Wanda Gág.

Other works passed through more quickly.

This seems fair.

Museums contain too much for loyalty.

The gift shop was good enough that I briefly considered returning to Philadelphia solely for the museum.

A dangerous sign.

A good museum shop can make you believe you have developed taste when you have mostly developed a desire to buy notebooks.

Outside, there was water.

This helped.

Water continues to be one of my least sophisticated and most reliable forms of emotional regulation.

I had spent enough time in Michigan learning that if the week had been annoying, one could stare at a large body of water until the annoyance lost some administrative authority.

Philadelphia offered a smaller version.

Still effective.

There were early signs of spring: grass returning, forsythia appearing, the landscape beginning its annual effort to convince everyone that winter had been temporary.

I climbed the museum steps and counted them.

Seventy-two.

I know this because, midway through, a man nearby began speaking loudly about hardship, life, and perseverance, then played a trumpet.

This nearly destroyed the count.

I recovered.

Seventy-two.

History preserved.

Nearby was the Rodin Museum.

Admission was free, which made the decision very easy.

I went to see The Thinker without thinking particularly hard about it.

There is something pleasant about encountering one of the most recognizable images of contemplation while operating almost entirely on impulse.

He looked serious.

I was not.

This arrangement seemed balanced.

---

Eventually I decided it was time to eat and headed toward Reading Terminal Market, retracing part of my 2022 itinerary.

Then I got distracted by parking.

Specifically, while looking for parking, I saw something about a flower show.

It was associated with PBS.

That sounded sufficiently institutional to suggest scale.

I went.

This turned out to be the main event of the entire trip.

It was also the final day.

I had not known the show existed.

I had not planned to attend.

I had almost driven past it.

This is one of travel’s irritating habits: the thing you organize carefully is often merely good, while the thing you stumble into by accident becomes the story.

The space was full of flowers.

Not a tasteful little arrangement near an entrance.

Flowers as environment.

Flowers as architecture.

Flowers behaving with the confidence normally reserved for sculpture.

There were installations, arrangements, displays large enough to walk around, colors so concentrated they seemed to affect the temperature of the room.

And the smell.

Photographs could record the shape and color, but not the fact that the entire place smelled alive.

That mattered more.

For a while I stopped trying to document everything.

I just stood inside it.

This is becoming a recurring pattern: the more I like something, the less interested I become in converting it into evidence.

A photograph is useful later.

Being there is useful immediately.

I saw tulips and thought of Michigan.

Apparently flowers now had regional associations in my brain.

Tulips belonged to Holland.

Some plants reminded me of ones I had unsuccessfully tried to keep alive in offices.

One looked almost exactly like a plant I had once left in a Michigan trailer office overnight without realizing the heat would shut off.

It froze to death.

A reunion of sorts.

---

After the flower show, I finally reached Reading Terminal Market.

It was packed.

There are levels of hunger that permit bravery.

Mine did not.

I looked at the crowd, abandoned the project, and ate bubble tea and a chocolate waffle at Gong Cha instead.

Philadelphia had offered culture, sculpture, music, flowers, and historical architecture.

I responded with sugar.

Reasonable.

I also stopped at La Colombe.

I first discovered the coffee on my 2022 trip and had been drinking it whenever I encountered it since.

There are places that become part of travel memory through major experiences.

There are others that become part of it because you had one very good cold brew three years ago and never emotionally recovered.

La Colombe belongs to the second category.

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I had technically come to Philadelphia because I rented a car to move.

Nothing about the weekend needed to happen.

That may have been why I enjoyed it so much.

There was no accomplishment attached.

No professional outcome.

No optimization target.

No reason the day needed to produce anything except the next interesting thing.

A concert I had misunderstood.

A museum I wandered through without pretending to understand everything.

A statue I visited thoughtlessly.

A flower show discovered while looking for parking.

Coffee remembered from another version of myself.

And, beneath all of it, the memory of Philadelphia in 2022—friends, melted ice cream, improvised rain protection, someone lying nearly flat on the ground to take my picture.

The city had not changed enough to erase that trip.

I had changed enough to experience the city differently.

That seemed like a good arrangement.

When I originally wrote about the weekend, I concluded that the lesson was to choose love.

This sounds suspiciously grand for a trip caused by a rental-car contract.

But I still understand what I meant.

Choose the thing you are drawn toward.

The concert.

The museum.

The detour.

The flowers.

The unnecessary drive.

Not because every choice becomes meaningful.

Some things work.

Some do not.

Some become terrible parking experiences.

But time passes regardless, and one might as well accumulate a few memories that were chosen deliberately.

The car had to be returned Monday.

That was enough structure for one weekend.