Monday, September 06, 2010
Boston with Amanda and Dana and then home again with Abigail and Bruce
Amanda added life to the day with her perky, laughing, warm and loving banter, her stories, her celebration of all ironic, her hugs. For some unknown reason she genuinely likes me and I soak it up. She is uncritical, uncompetitive, and relaxed with me, and simply enjoys me in a way few do.
And she is a pleasure to look at.
Amanda turns thirty this Christmas time, and so none of her attitude is at all jaded by aging or debility. She may have some questions about the directions of her life as she moves out of the twenties, but her youth and her care of herself precludes the kind of struggles with aches and pains and threats of serious illness that haunt my stage of life.
Lately she has been doing extensive hiking and is in perfect shape. She likes mountains and water.
She and Dana now work again in the same company, called 38, so perhaps we will see more of her.
Elizabeth and I do not have the shape or energy we once had for these outings, so we tired more quickly than I imagine when I think of being the tourist.
We stopped for a meal outside of sandwiches and soup.
We walked by Quincy Market.
And then we took the T home. Dana kept us out of the crowds and we had seats for the return trip. On the way out we stood and Elizabeth once lost her balance, but was saved by a fellow traveler.
With plenty of people to watch and conversations to enjoy on the T, the diversity of the crowds and the overall celebratory tone of the day made the ride, even when crowded, was quite delightful. I love sitting by Burden Lake each day and watching the birds, but it does isolate me from the mix and movement of people.
Compared to NYC this subway ride was more friendly and easy with fewer folks to watch carefully for aberrations that might be toublesome. Perhaps it was that we were on holiday as were most of our companions.
Missing in the mix were people in baseball style caps, except the Red Sox fans of course. I looked a bit of a character with my long beard and my light blue Colorado Bell Laughlin cap with dice on the brim. Few people wore hats in spite of the sunny day. I wondered if it were going out of style.
Amanda told us that her experience in LA had been very different from Boston, that the folks there seemed much more driven to present themselves as important, dressing up for the day, dropping names in the conversation, eager to impress. She did not like that. She is thrilled to be back in Boston and while she misses some of her LA friends, in general she loves the town.
I got that sense as well.
Odd too because the traditional view of Boston from my childhood going back, is that it is full of stuffy bluebloods and not as easy going. California always seemed the place where one relaxed. However, she felt that LA was very different from San Francisco and other parts of California.
On our great trip to California a couple years back, we certainly did not feel any of what she mentioned in brother Jim's town or as we drove up the Coast. We did not spend time in LA.
The three of us stopped for some yogurt and then came home to relax and watch some movies on television. Dana's choice in movies is always very different from mine. He likes what I generally avoid, movies which have the theme of the individual quest to save the group along with the scenes where the enemy nearly eliminates the good folks, but through nearly miraculous luck, as well as determined persistence, the hero/heroes emerge victorious. He also likes animation where typically the characters are one dimensional.
We watched two movies that were a bit like that. We also we watched a movie called the Invention of Lying which was very good. The world was still fantastic and imagined, but I could to some extent identify with the characters. None of these, however, match the power of Get Low for me. Still it passed the time. I was ready for sleep long before sleep was practical and slept easily and well as soon as my masked head hit the pillow.
Dana's couches are very comfortable. He made one into a pull out bed last night, but I am just too heavy for those. As a couch pre-pullout, the sleeping spot had so much more support and cushioning.
So I felt rested when I wake up now at three am. I am ready to hit the road, but Elizabeth is not. These old age days that start from three to five in the morning wear me down. There is rarely much to do during those times.
I was hoping to catch up on the internet but my connection has timed out.
HEADING HOME
We had a fine drive home, leaving early to beat the traffic. We stopped near Ware Mass for breakfast following an entry in the GPS, but it seemed as if it would be too far. I asked an old fellow at a Cumberlin Farms where we bought gas and he told me that Crystal Springs was just up the road. We would have passed by because the sign called it a dairy bar. As we pulled in we saw a couple dozen trucks, men standing about outside and we knew it would be good. It was. There was even a special Maple cinnamon bread made by a local Portuguese baker. It was delicious.
While we at a fellow at the counter was telling one of the other locals about another local who was building a house and encountered bears who came almost every day. Once he was using the chain saw in the backyard while the bear was sleeping in the front. His wife was so frightened that she drove her car the few yards to the mailbox and back into the garage so as not to encounter the bear when checking the mail.
This fellow and I started talking and he was quite friendly. He told us how to find the Quabbin Reservoir and that it only took ten minutes to drive through it and was well worth the time.
He was right.
It was fantastically beautiful and I want to go back when we have time and energy to walk some of it. Some of the lookouts let us peer over miles of water separated by green hilled islands and all of it undeveloped.
At one time it had been populated. Just before I was born it was created by flooding after they dismantled and moved the towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott and abandoning 36 miles of railroad. Some of the graves were moved. Some were not. There were photographs of these towns and what the valley looked like when they were vibrant, and again what it looked like after the flooding. Other photos are mixed in this collection:
Along the route we saw some deer grazing very near the road and very used to people.
It was a fine ride.
We had no traffic driving home. It was an easy journey.
Along the way we listen to Walk in the Woods read by the author Bill Bryson. I bought this with Schwartz at the book fair on tape. I almost passed it up as Bryson is just a bit too sarcastic for me in many of his travel books and he has trashed places he visited that I have been to and fully enjoyed. But Chuck told me it was the one book by this fellow that he had enjoyed and he was right. It was a perfect book on tape to travel along with and our journey went so much quicker listening to the slow ordeal of his journey.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Later we met Bruce and Abigail after they saw Get Low and loved it. They treated us to dinner at the foo foo restaurant near the Spectrum. I had a fine risotto which has to be the best I have ever eaten. The conversation was wonderful as always with stories of sweating copper plumbing, building and rebuilding, how to make kale chips, and various details of our children's lives. These two are just delightful! Yesterday they were married 29 years and together more like 40. Such a long, sweet time together.
Bruce is winding down on the farm , selling most of everything he harvests, and expecting either no rain or an early frost to end this year's crop soon.
We had cream brulee and a huge chocolate brownie sundae on top of all the regular food. Oh my, no chance of losing any fat today.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Live from Boston
We are up and Dana is sleeping.
We went to sleep at about nine last night. I suspect he was up until about one.
We all had a fine first day here at his his new apartment. It is a delightful neighborhood, filled with a diverse crowd of mostly young people: Asians, Slavic Europeans, Russians including Hassidic Jews in costume, and many many Boston College kids who yesterday were all in yellow T shirts indicating they were fans of Boston College. Dana had a matching shirt that indicated he was from University of Rochester. No Yankee cap, however.
As well as celebrating his new apartment, Dana is celebrating his new job. He has moved to a company called 38 after it's founder Curt Schilling's baseball jersey number. He will do pretty much the same work with perhaps more emphasis on development. He starts next week. It will move to Rhode Island, (maybe-see this); however, that is only a half hour away.
Dana is less than a mile from the campus and less than that from a fine little water reservoir with a delightful footpath. So unusually wonderful to be in the middle of city and yet on the edge of water. We walked a bit of it enjoying the fine breeze that broke the humidity (thanks Earl) and wondering about one stone building that looked exactly like the Albany City Hall.
Along the major road passing Dana's apartment building is the T. This is a delightful little train that runs above ground with a fine horn and some occasional tinkling of bells. It was fun to ride it to the restaurant.
The street is lined with one small shop after another. However, this is nothing like the repetitive fast food chain endless nothing we see along the roads in Florida. Each one of these little places seemed to have some distinctive character or charm. It is a very pleasant neighborhood, city but not crowded city, buys but not shoulder to shoulder crowded.
Of course, the crowds of Boston college aged students meant that on our walk there were scads of young, beautiful women, still dressed scantily for summer heat, their long bear legs graceful in the sunlight, who ran or sauntered through the park or along the sidewalks, who walked their dogs or had serious conversations with their boyfriends, sometimes in Asian languages.
They seemed to be everywhere.
So unpleasant for me!
I much prefer to be immersed in populations of people my own age, pushing walkers and talking about death and their latest medical procedures and ranting about how awful America is now compared to back in the day when I gather from their rants that life was good because in those good ole days we would never imagine having some lying, Black Muslim, non-citizen, Terrorist sympathizing, ultra Liberal, Socialist conspirator as President.
NO NO!! We liked Ike!!
And while we were after all in Boston, I doubted that we were watching too many people who identified with Tea Party movement or would easily use vocabulary like "refudiate."
Nor do I expect there were too many nativists who would feel comfortable in the Know Nothing Party of the 1860's.
These luscious, intelligent, and affluent young beauties reflected the diversity of America and seemed happy and hopeful and full of joyful life.
So annoying!
And if you believe that, I have a fine Boston water reservoir here that I can sell you for a pittance.
We ate at the Publix House in Brookline and selected from the menu of about seven hundred thousand beers. The beer menu is in very fine print and twenty times as long as the food menu. Once again I was sorry that the old days were gone when beer was just mildly carbonated alcoholic piss water, but I managed to adjust as best as an old guy can to all these modern choices.
I skipped the Belgium and Swiss beers. (After all, what did those countries do for us in WWII?)
I drank a local bitter called Hedgerow with full and delightful taste created by a brewery called Pretty Things, a name that seemed to appropriately complement my walk through the Brighton neighborhood and connected me with Emerson and Thoreau since it is brewed in Cambridge. Had the Transcendentalists met in this era, certainly it would be over beer and this local brewery their choice. So actually I wasn't indulging a decadent craving, but merely reducing literature to liquid.
The slogan of this brewery is they are "Hell bent on foolishness and frippery." I think I should like any beer that celebrates frippery or uses that vocabulary. So I suppose I might review the beer by saying,"Its full bitter taste reflected the delicate tension between Transcendentalist thought and frippery."
Dana had Racer X and Elizabeth had Arcadia Starboard stout.
Beers were served in glasses appropriate to each selection. There was a huge warning in the menu not to steal the glasses. I did pick up some coasters adverising Chimay beer.
With the beer was certainly the main portion of the meal, we also snacked well: Salmon, mac and cheese with Andalusia sausage, oysters and hushpuppies and a duck confrite. At the end we were full.
Then we went back to Dana's to watch this Matt Damon movie that is the most confusing movie I ever watched, all about the FBI, a corn syrup company, multinationals making illegal deals and an inventive, if habitual liar. This morning I read parts of one of Dana's books entitled Descartes Error in which the author attempts to reconfigure our common sense understanding of emotion and the rational brain. The entire book starts when Phineas Gage, a railroad worker gets distracted blowing up mountains of rock and blows his 3 foot tamper iron bar completely through his brain. He survives, but his personality is totally changed. I think had he lived in our era, he might have understood the Matt Damon movie.
It looks like a fine day today.
We might see Amanda. Joy o' joy! Or not, if she is busy.
Ah, the great tragedies of Boston life.
Dana is sleeping through most of the day so we may have to see Amanda after dark.
Elizabeth is also now sleeping once again.
We went to sleep at about nine last night. I suspect he was up until about one.
We all had a fine first day here at his his new apartment. It is a delightful neighborhood, filled with a diverse crowd of mostly young people: Asians, Slavic Europeans, Russians including Hassidic Jews in costume, and many many Boston College kids who yesterday were all in yellow T shirts indicating they were fans of Boston College. Dana had a matching shirt that indicated he was from University of Rochester. No Yankee cap, however.
As well as celebrating his new apartment, Dana is celebrating his new job. He has moved to a company called 38 after it's founder Curt Schilling's baseball jersey number. He will do pretty much the same work with perhaps more emphasis on development. He starts next week. It will move to Rhode Island, (maybe-see this); however, that is only a half hour away.
Dana is less than a mile from the campus and less than that from a fine little water reservoir with a delightful footpath. So unusually wonderful to be in the middle of city and yet on the edge of water. We walked a bit of it enjoying the fine breeze that broke the humidity (thanks Earl) and wondering about one stone building that looked exactly like the Albany City Hall.
Along the major road passing Dana's apartment building is the T. This is a delightful little train that runs above ground with a fine horn and some occasional tinkling of bells. It was fun to ride it to the restaurant.
The street is lined with one small shop after another. However, this is nothing like the repetitive fast food chain endless nothing we see along the roads in Florida. Each one of these little places seemed to have some distinctive character or charm. It is a very pleasant neighborhood, city but not crowded city, buys but not shoulder to shoulder crowded.
Of course, the crowds of Boston college aged students meant that on our walk there were scads of young, beautiful women, still dressed scantily for summer heat, their long bear legs graceful in the sunlight, who ran or sauntered through the park or along the sidewalks, who walked their dogs or had serious conversations with their boyfriends, sometimes in Asian languages.
They seemed to be everywhere.
So unpleasant for me!
I much prefer to be immersed in populations of people my own age, pushing walkers and talking about death and their latest medical procedures and ranting about how awful America is now compared to back in the day when I gather from their rants that life was good because in those good ole days we would never imagine having some lying, Black Muslim, non-citizen, Terrorist sympathizing, ultra Liberal, Socialist conspirator as President.
NO NO!! We liked Ike!!
And while we were after all in Boston, I doubted that we were watching too many people who identified with Tea Party movement or would easily use vocabulary like "refudiate."
Nor do I expect there were too many nativists who would feel comfortable in the Know Nothing Party of the 1860's.
These luscious, intelligent, and affluent young beauties reflected the diversity of America and seemed happy and hopeful and full of joyful life.
So annoying!
And if you believe that, I have a fine Boston water reservoir here that I can sell you for a pittance.
We ate at the Publix House in Brookline and selected from the menu of about seven hundred thousand beers. The beer menu is in very fine print and twenty times as long as the food menu. Once again I was sorry that the old days were gone when beer was just mildly carbonated alcoholic piss water, but I managed to adjust as best as an old guy can to all these modern choices.
I skipped the Belgium and Swiss beers. (After all, what did those countries do for us in WWII?)
I drank a local bitter called Hedgerow with full and delightful taste created by a brewery called Pretty Things, a name that seemed to appropriately complement my walk through the Brighton neighborhood and connected me with Emerson and Thoreau since it is brewed in Cambridge. Had the Transcendentalists met in this era, certainly it would be over beer and this local brewery their choice. So actually I wasn't indulging a decadent craving, but merely reducing literature to liquid.
The slogan of this brewery is they are "Hell bent on foolishness and frippery." I think I should like any beer that celebrates frippery or uses that vocabulary. So I suppose I might review the beer by saying,"Its full bitter taste reflected the delicate tension between Transcendentalist thought and frippery."
Dana had Racer X and Elizabeth had Arcadia Starboard stout.
Beers were served in glasses appropriate to each selection. There was a huge warning in the menu not to steal the glasses. I did pick up some coasters adverising Chimay beer.
With the beer was certainly the main portion of the meal, we also snacked well: Salmon, mac and cheese with Andalusia sausage, oysters and hushpuppies and a duck confrite. At the end we were full.
Then we went back to Dana's to watch this Matt Damon movie that is the most confusing movie I ever watched, all about the FBI, a corn syrup company, multinationals making illegal deals and an inventive, if habitual liar. This morning I read parts of one of Dana's books entitled Descartes Error in which the author attempts to reconfigure our common sense understanding of emotion and the rational brain. The entire book starts when Phineas Gage, a railroad worker gets distracted blowing up mountains of rock and blows his 3 foot tamper iron bar completely through his brain. He survives, but his personality is totally changed. I think had he lived in our era, he might have understood the Matt Damon movie.
It looks like a fine day today.
We might see Amanda. Joy o' joy! Or not, if she is busy.
Ah, the great tragedies of Boston life.
Dana is sleeping through most of the day so we may have to see Amanda after dark.
Elizabeth is also now sleeping once again.
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