If I was going to draw a map of my life, two large and meaningful sites on this life map would be the steel mills that sat along the banks of the Monongahela, and the Unversity of Pittsburgh. The main branch of the Carnegie Library is equally important, but I'm saving it for its own private blog.

My grandfather, father, several of my uncles, and one of my aunts studied at the University of Pittsburgh. I went there too. I am not a control freak and it never occurred to me to tell my son that he should keep up the family tradition. But his choice was Pitt and he majored in English, just as I did. Four generations.

How can you describe the Cathedral of Learning? I read recently that it's the second tallest school building in our hemisphere. It was where you went to become an adult. It was a serious place where lots of people rushed around holding books and briefcases and wearing hospital uniforms. The bookstore at Pitt had only one rival; the book department at Kaufmann's Department Store. The Pitt bookstore is still full of treasures but Kaufmann's sadly is long gone. The Cathedral of Learning points up to the sky, signifying achievement, self-mprovement, reading, and the pursuit of personal goals.

Our house stood at the crest of a steep hill. At the back of the house you could look down to Beachwood Boulevard; and after that, another downward plunge and there stood the steel mills along the river. When I was very young, standing in the back yard and looking down all that way terrified me. It made me think that if you took one wrong step you'd start to roll head over heels and crash onto Beechwood Boulevard, then continue to roll until you slammed into one of large, oblong structures that housed the mills. This was the time before Pittsburgh cleaned itself up; black smoke pumped out of the buildings three times every day. A shrill, high-pitched whistle blew at 8:00 am, 4:00 pm, and midnght, signifying the changing of shifts. If the Cathedral of Learning symbolized intellectual prowess, the steel mills were hands-on, fiery places where sweating men got dirty all day, then came home, their faces and clothes smeared with soot.

My life has swung back and forth like a pendulum between the Cathedral of Learning and the mills. I read, I write, I have a good education. But for six years I worked in a business with my husband, making molds and reproductions of artists' sculptures and related jobs. I used my hands to do this work every day and my mind lay fallow, enjoying the rest it was getting. And when I came home I was covered with dust and I had dirt under my fingernails. I stood at the cellar door and stripped off my clothes, threw them down the cellar steps, then jumped into the shower right before my son came home from school, and each day I did this I thought about the steel mills.