A Love Letter to Boston

Last week I made one final trip into the city to say goodbye before the chaos of the moving process really took hold in earnest. As I have always done over the years when feeling out of sorts, I paid a visit to the historic wing of the Boston Public Library. The elegance and timelessness of the baroque architecture and Sargent’s beautiful murals have never failed to make me feel calmer and more centered when Im feeling run down, overwhelmed, or even just sad. In the dim, womblike enclosure of the upper level I almost always find myself alone, which is truly a rare thing in downtown Boston.

At this time the library was hosting a retrospective exhibition of Jules Aarons’ photographs of Boston Neighborhoods during the 1950’s and 1960’s and it felt appropriate to check it out and make contact with the city’s history one last time. But looking at these incredibly intimate and candid shots of street life during a time before I was born, I had a hard time relating what I saw to the Boston of today, the Boston that I know. I realized just how much the city must have changed over the years and how little I was aware of those changes. My presence here for these last 8 years has been little more than a blip on the city’s radar. So I started to wonder….do I really ‘know’ Boston at all?

Maybe that is a part of the sadness of leaving that I hadn’t counted on…this feeling that I have nothing to hold on to, that I cant take Boston with me because it isn’t mine, was never mine, at least not in the way that the people who have been born and raised here feel it in their very bones, feel that it belongs to them and they to it. I have loved my life here but in some ways I have always been just visiting, an eternal interloper or tourist. It seems that I have never had enough time to see everything, to learn everything, I was just passing through.

But Boston, I love you. I love you so very much. I love that your streets distain the thought of a grid, that they meander in organic madness and make walking more efficient than driving. I love how mom and pop stores from another era still cling to business in the midst of your most gentrified areas. I love the way that slick steel and glass skyscrapers sit shoulder to shoulder so companionably with crooked townhouses of aging brick and stone. I love your back alleys, where some of the best restaurants hide. I love your river that divides you from Cambridge, but never manages to keep you apart. I love your graveyards where the stones have been washed clean of memory by rain and wind. I love your suburbs, where each town retains its own unique identity, while still remaining loyal, and I love all of the amazing, challenging, and wonderful people that I have been privileged to call friends.

I love you for what you were, what you are, for all the things I have seen, and all things I have been blind to. You took me in and nurtured me, even though I wasn’t your own and now you are letting me go, sending me on my way to a new destiny. And maybe I have actually been privileged because I have never belonged to you….your sights have never become mundane and you have never ceased surprising me. Often an outsider can see things that a native cannot. So I hope because of this, you’ll let me carry just a part of you with me. Goodbye Boston, I will never forget you, and Im sure we will meet again one day.

The Cat Came Back

I truly love living in a city (or at least within shouting distance of one). Yes, its noisy, the traffic is atrocious, and its hard to find personal space when you are out and about, but a city is so varied, so multi-layered, so full of stories and textures that it can attain an almost magical quality if you look at it the right way. Read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and you’ll see what I mean. He understood that what we think of as one city, as a single organism is actually many worlds, all crammed together, all coexisting. Some of these worlds are obvious and some can only been seen in the right light or when you are in the right mood.

I grew up in suburbia and for me cities were once places where one went on vacation….as some people go on safari. You gawk, you keep a map close at hand, and when you leave, its almost with a sigh of relief. Oh yes, I’d say, I love to visit, but I could never LIVE there. So when I first moved to Boston for Grad school about 7 years ago, I was so terrified, that I literally didn’t leave my apartment for several days. I sensed that the city was a beast, that it wanted to absorb me, digest me, and I wasn’t ready to give myself up to something bigger than myself that I couldn’t understand. But over the years I learned how to do just that and it was only then that I was able to see past the big picture and pick out the tiny facets beneath.

I’m writing about this now because of one of these tiny facets that I noticed last week, the type of little incident that seems unimportant but manages to tenaciously stick in your mind.

When I was working in the South End, I used to take the commuter rail into South Station early every morning. Right before the train heads into the station, it crosses a sort of wasteland of access roads, construction sites, and rusted heaps of metal. Every time I passed through this spot on my morning commute, my eye was caught by the same thing; a sort of make-shift dog house sitting right there in the middle of this industrial dumping ground. It was really no more than a box with a small door cut out of it, and there was often a bowl for food or water placed out front. I always wondered what sort of creature lived there, but never gave it more than idle speculation. Then, several weeks ago I was taking the train into downtown on a shopping trip and saw that the house was gone. Suddenly I felt very very sad…, as if instead of a mystery being solved, it had simply been blotted out. I was surprised how much this little bit of a story and its disappearance had affected me. A few days later I was again riding the train, and there it was, a brand new house, this one very obviously hand crafted. Sitting next to it was a large grey Persian cat.

It sounds silly I know, but the sight of a domestic cat, out there in a place that is the closest to the middle of nowhere that you can come to in a city, was almost shocking to me. I thought wow….this is it, this is the animal that has been living here all these years. Someone that works on the trains saw this animal, fed it, built a home for it, and has cared for it all this time….and probably very few other people are even aware of its existence. It is tied to the city as much as the train, the station, all the other large blatant parts of Boston are, but it exists in another world that can only be seen if you are looking for it. It made me wonder….how many other things are living and happening that I don’t know about. Things in odd corners, in back alleys, or maybe even right out in front of me? This is what it is to be part of a city, I mused,….it’s a constant discovery, an eternal exploration. Who knows what those canyons and jungles of cement and steel have to offer. I guess that’s why its so important to always fight for the window seat on the train. ;-)