A Working Antique

I work in an antique building situated on our town common, at least until we move to a shiny, spanking new building a quarter of a mile away, which is slated to happen after the first of the year. 

Our current office used to be a house, and it’s got to be at least two hundred years old, complete with heat you can’t turn off, occasional mice infestations, and the staccato cadence of the apartment dwellers who live overhead.  But it sure is pretty. The common itself is a historic district.  If you live in one of the homes there, you can’t modify it without permission, you can only paint the exterior with certain colors.  Every day I park my car in front of Meeting House Pond, and on mornings when the wind is still, I catch reflections of First Parish Church (the old Meeting House), or the town hall rippling top of the water. 

I’m a little like Cinderella most mornings, the clock on the common is chiming the hour when I pull up, and I scamper across the street trying to get through the door before it stops.  But there are days the clock finishes before I cross the street, because I have to fish in my purse for my I-phone and take yet another a picture of a scene that’s been the same for hundreds of years. I know I've posted similar photos here before, so please bear with me.  No matter how many times I capture it, it hits me every time.

Stunning a view as it is, working in the historical district means there’s no cell tower near, which guarantees lousy phone service.  When we need to take or make personal calls with our cells, we have to walk outside, plug one ear against the traffic rumbling by and shout into the phone.  I was doing that one morning last week when I looked out to something unexpected.  Usually the pond is populated with ducks.  

A photo op for me, but bad news for the goldfish.  Gosh, I’m going to miss this when we move.

A Pilgrimage

"We Choose Love"

I took a trip to Boston Friday, my first in over a year.  We’d driven through, but hadn’t stopped since Patriot’s Day, 2013, a day of such profound pain in our region.  No, I wasn't there.  But a year later, I still find it difficult to wrap myself around what happened, bombs exploding, shrapnel flying, death and catastrophic injury, rivers of blood painting the sidewalk, cities on lock-down, a shootout in the streets. 

 But now, I have this.

  

After the bombing, people came to grieve, to morn, to process, to support, and a memorial grew at the site of the explosions.  Sneakers and T-shirts, signs, flowers, ribbons, candles, crucifixes, a mountain of agony and hurt and emotion growing in a place forever marked by horrific tragedy.  After weeks, the city had to move the memorial to Copley Plaza.  In June they disassembled it, vowing though, to keep every piece of it intact, which they did.  And last week, in time for this year’s race, they resurrected pieces of the memorial in an exhibit at the Boston Public Library.  When I heard this, I knew it was time to go.

You see, the Boston Marathon was a family event for me.  Growing up, we lived walking distance to the half-way mark and on Patriots' Day, aka, Marathon Monday, we scampered to town and cheered on the runners, some years handing them wet sponges, sliced oranges, cups of water.  As a recent college grad, I stood with friends at “Heartbreak Hill” and encouraged weary participants.  As a newlywed, I stood on the top floor of my sister’s house on the old route through Ashland, growing dizzy as wave after wave of runners flowed by her house. I took my daughter to see the race...at the half-way point with my brother, at the beginning with my sister.

In spite of such happy memories, long before last year, Patriot’s Day, our quintessentially Massachusetts holiday, was marked by grief for me.  When I was a child, my grandmother died early that morning, delivering my first searing, incomprehensible introduction to a sorrow so big for me then, so unfathomable, that I can compare the way it rocked my little sphere, to what I felt on September 11, 2001, and, on Patriots’ Day 2013—as if the world was picked up and shaken, tumbled upside down, pockets emptied of all comfort and all certainty except one…that life would never be the same.   

Last April, when this newest, awful grief landed, I struggled to cope.

Since then, I’d wanted to honor those lost and injured, to pay tribute to this Boston that refused to bow down to terror, our proud and hopeful and forward moving city.  But, I didn’t. And I needed to. I needed to get my centered self back.  And for some reason, this exhibit at the library gave me the excuse, made it possible for me to make a peace with the atrocity of last  spring, to reclaim my own kernel of Boston.

 

And so, three days before this year's race, I trudged up the steps of the subway mid-morning, walked down Boylston Street, eyeballed the blue and yellow finish line, paused at the cherry tree in front of The Forum Restaurant where one of the bombs exploded, where passersby continue to leave flowers, Friday, yellow and pink tulips in memory.

Then I crossed the street and entered the library to visit the centerpiece of sneakers with their messages of inspiration, all shapes and sizes of Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins jerseys etched in black markers with moving snippets, notes written on yellow stickies, on lined sheets, construction paper, poster board, consolation captured like floating angels, heartfelt words netted in red pen, blue, black, purple and gold.  From New Jersey, Minnesota and Newtown, CT, from California and Istanbul, messages from across the world, encouraging us, hugging us, patting Boston on the back, holding the city up.

 

Toward the end of the display, visitors were invited to write remarks on tags and hang them on the branches of four cherry trees, and I wrote the only words that I could come up with to sum up what hovered at my core, after seeing such a moving presentation. 

Afterward, I sat down and watched a slide show of the memorial as it had appeared on the street, before it was moved.  So many sneakers, so many messages, so much pain and love, hope and heart.  I was stunned by all the goodness, and the words written on the side of a running shoe captured what flowed like liquid inside of me, the sentence I would have written on a tag and hung on a tree, if only I had thought of it first.

“I have never loved this city more.”

And if that wasn't enough, settled as I was inside myself, with a good calm in my heart, I walked across Boston Common on my way back to the train station, and found this.

 In honor of all the victims, but especially Martin Richards, Kristal Campbell, Lingzi Lu, April 15, 2013, Sean Collier April 18, 2013 and  for Mary Florence O'Brien Lucas, April 21, 1969.

Inhale the...What?

Sometimes my daughter and I head out to one of our favorite sandwich spots one town over, where we’ll order something to split, have it wrapped to go, and take a ride to the sea.  We park, when we can score a space, in one of the four spots available by a cement wall overlooking the ocean.  There, the view rolls out over hunchback waves.  To the south, land curves like a ballet arm, to the north, massive rocks sprout from the sea.  Minot Light flashes 1-4-3 in the distance.

For years, a snippet of graffiti marked the wall in front of where we park, instructions, scrawled in black spray paint to “Inhale the imagery.”  Now, normally I'm not a fan of "street art."  But this was different, the words a reminder to look up, to look out, to make sure the expanse of sea and soul never becomes routine.  The phrase remained on the wall so long; it fused with local culture, fading from an obnoxious tag into a kind of home-grown philosophy.  Someone uses it as a Twitter handle.  It's the title to a local photographer's website.  Bottom line? People liked it.  

 

   

That said, the words became a piece of our family lore for another reason.  Many years ago, our learning-to-read daughter noticed the paint and read out loud, “Inhale the imaginary.”  For years, we giggled when we pulled up to the scene and remembered her slip, the story so much a part of our family DNA that when we arrived one day and discovered someone had washed over the phrase with paint, we turned to each other and cried, “Oh no.” 

We visit that place a lot, and somewhere along the line it occurred to me that while all those years ago, our daughter misread the line, as a would be fiction writer, the one she came up with was equally as important.  Not only do I need to open myself to the imagery, to what is beautiful in every day life, but to whimsy and fantasy, too--to inhale the imaginary. But I've come to realize it takes one to feed the other.  Paying attention to what's in front of me makes me cognizant of detail and nuance and helps to make the fiction more real.  

I laugh when I think that someone sporting a can of black spray paint could have had such a positive influence on me, but I'm not the only one. 

The next time we visited after the "paint-over" discovery, the words were back.  This time, spray painted white.

Go ahead.  Take a deep breath...

A Salad Poem

You dream the aroma

of a ripe tomato,

the twist and snap and green smell
of vine and sun-warmed hands.

It's all there in the seed,

or sapling bedded in loam.

You count forward-time,

hot days and long months,

until the plant hangs heavy,

a bowl returns full,

until you slice and salt

and pair

with half-moons of 

oozing cheese,

knee-buckling at

the sweet, hot swallow
of acid and saliva.

It’s all there,
as you tear open the package.

sprinkle the seeds.

Press them into egg carton cups.

A repository for summer,

an incubator of earth to mouth,

a sauce, a salsa, a sandwich.

You brush dirt over with your finger,

and feel the promise of wait.

What can I say?  It was a really long winter.  My feet are still cold.  In spite of the fact that my daughter has informed me she likes all my blog posts, except for the poems,well, a girl has to treat herself.  Daydreaming about a tomato brought me closer to a summer garden.