bear

What belongs on a Boston bucket list? Like, despite having lived here for nearly two decades, I have still never walked the Freedom Trail, even though living in Boston is what’s turned me into a walker, and a biker. But I’ve walked out to Castle Island, around Jamaica Pond, through the Middlesex Fells and the Blue Hills, down Comm Ave and up the Greenway, Mass Ave nearly end to end, through the Harvard campus more times than I can count (though I can still get lost at MIT), from downtown to Fenway Park on multiple game nights where I didn't feel like cramming myself into the sardine can known as the Green Line. I’ve navigated Somerville by specific Bathtub Marys, and greater Boston by specific Dunks. I've biked on Storrow Drive and out to Bedford on the Minuteman and pretty much most places in between; kayaked along the Charles, and swum in Walden Pond and the Mystic Lakes and the Res; ice skated on Frog Pond and under the lights of Kendall Square. And, well, fallen on my ass multiple times because black ice and long New England winters. Heh.

( a love letter to Boston because I'm a creature of nostalgia )

I've made my home in triple-decker Victorians, Federalist brick and brownstone, the top floor of a Queen Anne where H and I learned to dub birds "those CHIRP CHIRP MOTHERFUCKERS" because they would wake us up at 3 am in the summer, a duplex close enough to the Minuteman I could constantly watch our neighbors stream by on bikes, even on the couch of the Cambridgeport Commune for a couple of months. And now, after two decades in Boston, two dozen years in New England, and too many cubic yards of snow shoveled, our time here is drawing to a close; in August, we are moving to the Bay Area.



We'll still be (long) walking distance to the train; I'll still bike to local farmers' markets. I'll add more swimming to the mix; H will add more hills to his half-marathon training, but still be able to run on a bike path near our new place. I already have a spreadsheet entitled "Bay Area Farmers Markets and Independent Bookstores," and we have a plan to identify the best pizza places nearby so we can find our go-to as quickly as possible. We will miss all you locals dearly, but we will be back. Just not in, say, January. ;)

Bay Area friends, I'm sure I'll have questions for you about the practicalities of this new life we're trying out. For now, I'm looking forward to seeing more of you all starting in August!

And yep, we're driving across. 90 most of the way, then detouring a bit to avoid the worst heat of Nevada in summer the best we can. (Neither of us are Burning Man candidates, I'm afraid. :) ) Highlights we hope to hit: Cedar Point, the Dane County Farmers' Market, Yellowstone; other things TBD, hopefully many of them kitschy, delicious, and/or beautiful. Any recs from those of you who've done this before? We'll have most of two weeks to do this.

This has been the strangest week ever.

4/15: Holy crap, apparently bombs went off at the Marathon finish line? "Mass casualty event"?! (Right now getting most of my info from UHub. Nothing on boston.com yet.)

Have heard from friends who'd gone down to watch that they're okay. Parker was there; is okay, but is in lockdown with the rest of the sports press right now.

4/16: I first heard about it because friends who were there posted to Facebook, and then I looked over at Twitter and my feeds went from "Yay Ethiopians!" and "I just had the grossest lunch ever" and "So, who else is falling asleep at their desk?" to "Holy crap, explosions!" and "I'm okay!" and "Bostonians, please check in!" in the space of about 10 minutes. I was incredibly grateful yesterday for people adopting these "always connected" technologies and using them to share that they were okay - only a decade ago, when things like this happened, we had to write up check-in tools ourselves; today, they're well-established.

You can't possibly secure a marathon course the same way you secure a sporting event at a stadium. The whole point is that it's a community event, especially in Boston - you can decide to wander down to the finish line at any point, walk away to get lunch after seeing the winners, come back to cheer on the charity racers, watch from your office building and get so caught up in the excitement that you decide to skip out of work for half an hour to join the festivities. And the crowd size and density. Especially at the finish line, sidewalks packed full of specators between buildings and fences, very little room to move quickly and freely. Really easy to drive up the casualty numbers - two small bombs in that densely populated of a space sent almost 200 (per the Times) people to the hospital.

4/18: The "blame all brown Americans" bullshit continues. Just like the aftermath of 9/11. Learning from history, not us.

4/19, 7:39 am: Staying home. Staying safe. Baking cookies. Maybe getting some sleep at some point, because obviously didn't get much last night. Glad Watertown peeps are checking in confirming they're keeping their asses at home, too.

I think the "shit is REAL"-est part to me is hearing that Harvard has closed, because they NEVER close. They've even shut down the taxis and Hubway, in addition to THE ENTIRE MBTFREAKINGA, Amtrak, the airport and a no-fly zone, it wouldn't surprise me if they blocked off private cars driving down there.

9:25 pm: I am so grateful for all of our protectors, but I'm especially in admiration right now of the negotiator who convinced the guy to give himself up consciously. That takes mad skills.

4/21: hyounpark is pretty unambiguously Korean-looking, and there were definitely points throughout this week when crazies were about a step away from linking East Asian appearance with "tairism," thanks a lot Kim Jong Un and the American media for overhype and buying into it. :P And I'm ambiguous-looking enough for us both to be worried about me as well. And an Indian-American friend of mine was at Sonsie on Newbury last night and got yelled at by a worker there to "go back to his country." HE WAS BORN IN CLEVELAND, YOU DIPSHIT. Besides which, coverage of the victims has focused on the Boston-born, while people stumble to pronounce Lu Lingzi. (Lu Lingzi: 38,700 results. Krystle Campbell, 68,900 results. Martin Richard, 115,000 results.)

But yeah, we did not feel the desire to go out Friday night to join in the celebrations, partly because old and lazy, partly because depending on whether or not we had white-appearing "chaperones" possibility of racist stupidity, especially given all the alcohol involved in any likely place of celebration.

I really, really need to get my DAR card, because rubbing it in the faces of all these racist assholes and the system that supports them? Sheer beauty, even if futile-feeling.