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I had this idea in my head for a long time that it would be cool to make it to Columbia Point, one of my favorite spots in Boston, on a really stormy day to savor the wind-sweepiness and open sky and general urban outpost meets wide Atlantic flavor. And with my camera to take amazing shots and capture the feel of it all.
There is such a great backstory about the long history of beat-up, resilient Dorchester, the massive neighborhood that's almost a town within the city, and how a long-contested, long-suffering peninsula on the edge of a dense city neighborhood became the home of a massive University campus and the stately JFK Library and how bike and walking paths now connect the point to the down town far off, the Boston Harbor of Freedom Trail and enormous white cruise ships and clam-consuming tourist hordes.
Sometimes people can live in the same city and in different worlds.
But anyways, rather than taking any deeply insightful images, I found that I froze my freaking fingers off, in yesterday's Boxing Day storm. The wind blew so hard in my face that the snow absolutely stung and I struggled to even look at anything for more then five seconds. I dodged around the white walls of the JFK and I struggled through some sort of U Mass Japanese garden thing and I went down to the seaside walk and tried to embrace the view of the storm-lashed ocean dissolving into the snowy fog. I was amazed to see a coal black cormorant simply riding the waves as the snow blew in gusts and gusts. I fled back to my car after some embarrassingly small number of minutes.
But I did spend a great deal of time afterwards in my warm basement, googling for warm gloves that would somehow let me push a camera button. On a future adventure.
The late willows in Larz Anderson Park, Thanksgiving week
This is the social season, December. First, this week, my music gals took me out to the Paradise rock club and the dreadful young people in the band did not commence playing until *ten o'clock" my dears. And I was grumpy and my feet hurt and I scowled and I had half a mind to go home like the fartiest of old farts. And then the band came on, who are, I must admit, not even so old as that being actually fortysomethings such as myself, and yet they partied and boogied and got down and were kind of wonderful.
Better Than Ezra
Then we had an enormous family party, the Christmas one where we rent a VFW hall and there are fat babies in red onsies and little girls in velvet holiday dresses running in circles and little boys trying to swipe each others' action figures and flush stuff down the toilet and a Yankee swap where we trade cheap scented candles and Red Sox shot glasses and plush throw, and then we feast on plates full of sausage and pasta and ham and fried rice and there is Sam Adams beer. And all us people with a lifetime full of issues, memories, connections, weirdnesses and stuff.
Then tonight I went to the first half of Nicholas Nickleby, the first three hours of a two night, six hour play in which 24 actors play 150 characters and deal with poverty, greed, outcasts, sympathy, jealousy, humor, pity, sadism, melodrama, and sentiment.
Also I need to finish Room with a View for book club on Tuesday night because tomorrow night is Therapy Night when I am squished through an emotional wringer and reduced to a toothpaste of traumatized feeling and confusion.
It is possible I am overscheduled this week.
My late Dad taught me about testing the Christmas lights. How you take them down each year from their distant attic home, and carefully spread them out on the living room floor, and plug them in, and carefully eyeball each glowing little bulb, before you go anywhere near the actual tree.
Why? Well, because. I guess for safety, to make sure none of the little sockets is visibly spitting sparks and flames. And for dignity, so you don't wrap an entire strand all around your precious captive evergreen and only then find it's all dull and dead and finally come to the end of the long life that started twenty years ago at the Rexall Drug Store.
But see then if I were truly safety conscious I would talk my mom out of using these tangled old green strands that started life twenty years ago at the Rexall Drug, and do get a little creepily hot, and we'd replace them with little neat cool-to-the-touch eco friendly LED lights, and a tree made of renewable hemp and arugala, and then maybe we'd stop doing Christmas Eve dinner as an enormous pile of lobster and melted butter and alcohol and family political argument and then we'd be completely different people.
Testing, testing.
