Yowie, South Street and Ikea Furniture

I smelled the smoke about two blocks from 4th and South. I’d left home walking into a drizzle, clinging to the walls on the high side of the sidewalk. I broke at work the day before, completely fell apart, and my posture and my gait revealed how weak and small I felt.

As I neared South Street, the once vital and exciting center for creatives, entrepreneurs and hustlers, I felt as dead as the street had become. It had always been an optimistic place and years ago, living there, I tried on new clothes, new music, new life. The street begged you to do that and gave you the opportunity and the means. Now the street can’t catch a break. A long shutdown, a slow surrender, and fires burned iconic places on busy corners where people from far away from Philadelphia came to observe a pageant of what they could have been if they’d only followed their dreams. I’d given up following mine and like the street fell into a long decay shuttered like the vacant storefronts that crowded out the few businesses left.

There was a sign on the door at Yowie, a carefully curated design space which my daughter and I sometimes stop at and buy things, mostly gifts for my wife, always impressed by the nowness of the place. One of our first after Covid shutdown after school outings was to go there again. I thought, if anyplace represented the promise and possibility of what this part of Philly could become, this was it. Shannon Maldonado, the owner, took to my daughter. She took to everyone who came into the shop. I’ve had a long career in retail and Yowie always struck me as how it should be done.

But there was the acrid smell of smoke hanging heavy in the air. In my mood, defeated, I could barely lift my eyes from the ground. The light rain muddled the soot and dampened the trash that had washed down 4th Street from Jim’s Steaks on the corner. The sign that hung in Yowie’s window said storefront available early 2023. Everything in this section of the city where I came alive and settled down and first broke was ending. I was ending, with no place to go but a pharmacy to pick up medicine for my bipolar disorder that wasn’t working very well right now. Feelings uncomfortable, because I haven’t felt them in a long time, consumed me, like the fire consumed Jim’s just days before. It was as if the damp, dirty smell of smoke came from me. All eventually surrender to the struggle of this life. All give up long before they die. But they all don’t, and I knew better.

I had to leave the safety of my arm’s length from the buildings, my lane away from the center of the sidewalk, to step into the street and get around the barriers that kept people, except for the fire marshals and the news crews with their cameras poking through the front door to get pictures of the black consumed walls from which once hung autographed pictures of all the celebrities who had lined up on the street for cheesesteaks along with everybody else outside this, “you don’t impress me, get in line” gateway to South Philly, crunching over the glass still scattered in the street. Next door to the boarded up, smoke-stained hulk of Jim’s kneeled the Eye’s Gallery, the first victim of the fire that took away so many tourists’ reason to come here. South Street, where I lived as a punk decades ago, where my illness first disrupted my life, threw me out of work, and ruined my first real relationship, dangled and drifted like the smoke in the air. Plagued recently by shootings, carjackings, raids of kids on dirt bikes and ATVS running pedestrians off the sidewalks and aggressive beggars who insulted you like you owed them something, I felt my crumbling life and this dying street were one. Business after business closed, and as the smell of the smoke clung to my wet shirt and hair as I crept west past the smoke shops, sneaker stores and resale hovels that remained I was sure that it would all end here. That was it – no coming back. But in a way this street had always been this way. And in a way I knew better.

The Pharmacy was the place of ultimate surrender. I couldn’t get by without these pills. I had more in common with the junkies sleeping in parkas on cardboard in the entrances of the many vacant stores than I had with my friends who held jobs and helped their kids with their homework. My wife and kid weren’t with me right now, didn’t want to be, and as for consistency, as for the thing I could surely hold on to year after year, there are these pills. And then there weren’t.

Because of my celiac disease I have to be sure the pills I take are gluten free. One medicine kept making me sick, until I received a bottle from a particular manufacturer. That refills have to include pills from that manufacturer is in my profile at the pharmacy. But they screw up the order all the time. I called a few days early, when notified the refill was ready for pickup, and was assured by a tech who rushed me off the phone that the pills were from that manufacturer. At the window still cracked from robbery attempts during a summer of riots two summers ago I was given the bag of bottles that clearly stated that the pills were from some other manufacturer. I broke down. I was in the throes of the most difficult mixed episode I had faced in years and I stood in the aisles of locked up items in the middle of a pharmacy and cried. I was out of pills and the best they could do to rectify their mistake was to have the right pills delivered the next day, another day when I would have to overcome the sudden agoraphobia that locked me inside my house and myself, crawl down the stinking length of South Street, shaking and consumed with trepidation, and hope to God they got it right this time.

I write about meaningful work and I insist that no matter what you do your work is meaningful. Someone in that pharmacy didn’t bother to actually check if they were giving me the right pills and now, possibly because they didn’t grasp the important meaning of their work, I slipped back into the humid mist and, somehow, trudged back home. I don’t remember the walk, I don’t remember hitting the couch, I don’t remember anything until the sun came up the next day. When we’re at our lowest, when our optimism is gone, the best we can do is forget.

The next afternoon, drawing on all the resolve I had to quit reaching for knives to draw out the emotional pain and a little bit of blood I called the pharmacy. I was put on hold and after a few ponderous minutes of waiting the line went dead. Time passed like a fallow field of browning plants thirsting in this summer’s drought, yesterday’s drizzle just a tease like the bag of bottles handed to me by the pharmacist the day before, and I managed to call again. This time someone bothered to speak with me and, again, quickly assured me the new pills were from the correct manufacturer. I asked her to please, actually go check the bottle. Another long hold but this time she came back and said, yes, the order was correct. I set out again, this time into a blazing sun, and once again rounded the corner where Jim’s stood just days before, and the news crews were gone, the line of tourists waiting to taste a cheesesteak were gone, my ability to go to my job was gone and somewhere, somehow my hope.

Walking home just a slight bit lighter, invited by my wife and daughter to rejoin them, but too dizzy and agitated to make the drive, I looked east on South Street, the late afternoon sun behind me, casting long shadows that I followed down the gum stained sidewalks, smelling the pot clinging to almost everyone who walked by, watching a store clerk chase down a shoplifter and fight with him in the street, the stolen products falling from the bag and breaking on the pavement, the thief pushed onto his back and the clerk running back to his store. It was all in shadow now, and I felt drawn to the tarot card reader between Haagen-Dazs and the Indian restaurant for a glimpse into a future I wasn’t sure I had. But I didn’t need the mystic, because just a few doors down on South between 2nd and 3rd work was being done on the new Yowie. Shannon is building a new shop, a café and a hotel on a street too many, even I, have given up on. After two years in which we’ve all been cautioned by threats and disappointed by the failings of every icon ever erected, two years during which so much fell apart and so much closed and was cancelled, Shannon is building something that didn’t exist before. And there I saw the future. The design would be perfect, the hospitality generous, and all who came imbued with an optimism we cling to if we want things to get better. Yowie would succeed and the street would live again.

We live in a world where a person can go through an entire life and never dirty their hands; never put two pieces of something physical together; never build anything they can pick up and give to someone else. I made it to my wife and daughter the next day and my daughter and I spent the next two days building Ikea furniture. You might think that building Ikea furniture would be the worst thing an agitated manic depressive bent of self-harm could do. But she and I put it together, a daybed, and then a friend came and slept on it. And the house was better than it was before and our relationship was better than it was before, and in this simple, physical, focused and meaningful work I felt better than I did before.

North and South of the long demise of South Street lie Society Hill and Queen Village, two of the most desirable neighborhoods in Philadelphia. In each house parents drive their children to get into the best schools, to be star of the sports team, to get the lead role in the play. They keep their kids off South Street. I, too, headed down this path that, for my daughter, who has little interest in school or most sports or plays, but who has an infectious personality and is enormously creative in things that are more difficult to measure, things that more uppity parents might say don’t count, could result in a dead end. But she loves Yowie, she admires Shannon, she’s a natural for design, film and making jewelry and, as we shared with a piece of Ikea furniture which would be maddening for the perfect students with conventional futures and big 529s, she likes to build things. Mood disorders are passed genetically, and my wife and I worry about our daughter’s future, especially since she seems little interested in the things that we think will lead to success for her. But perhaps we’re wrong. Perhaps she has just what it takes to be healthy, engaged and make a true difference to the people she touches and the world she encounters. Perhaps on the next school career day we should keep her home, walk her to the boarded-up storefronts of South Street, step over the abandoned possessions of some homeless person, stand in front of the rising façade of Yowie and tell her, “This is how it’s done.”

For if you want to change the world, if you want to change yourself, if you want to make things better, you have to do the work and build something that wasn’t there before. All work is meaningful, and all life is meaningful. To build is to be optimistic. And even in the crumbling decay of a street long-failing, of a life gone wrong, of the terror of falling ill, optimism is warranted. Nothing will happen to people who don’t do the work. Nothing. Work goes well beyond money, well beyond getting by into the core of our being, into real sustenance, into meaning. My episode continues as suffering is ever present. Days still threaten to spin out of control. But at the end of the long shadows of evening of a day that could have been wasted rises a pillar of possibility. A pillar onto which we pin our hopes. For tomorrow the sun will rise and the shadows will lengthen from the other end of the street and the work of thriving, the work of flourishing, will begin again. Then the shadows will shorten and the sun will burn directly overhead. And life will be worth it.

For more on the practice and benefits of meaningful work to help predict, prevent and manage episodes of anxiety, depression and mania, please check out, and hopefully buy, my book Practicing Mental Illness: Meditation, Movement and Meaningful Work to Manage Challenging Moods. Thanks.