Lizkdc Dislocation

Mysterious (Stone) Skin: Another Urban Woods Question

Ok, urban detectives: somebody out there may know what these fragments are?

 

Another favorite place I have in our corner of the city is Millenium Park, the rewarding but not overly-prettified piece of rescued riverland scrub along an upstream bend of the Charles River near the VFW Parkway.  This undramatic wetland, long snubbed and left aisde for graveyards, DPW storage, a dump, and the backyard of the Irish Alehouse, got rescued a few decades ago, and turned into a really well-thought out park and the home grounds of West Roxbury High, as well.

It retains an air of strangeness, if you feel it.  Exit through one wooded side, and you can wander into the grounds holding a few fragments of the long-vanished Transcendentalist commune called Brooke Farm, where Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller and their pals messed incompetently around at idealized rural living.  Away along one of the graveyard drives is an old marker stating that Civil War troops long ago trained in what were open fields.  Follow other paths, and you can wander through Gethsemane and several other miles of abutting graveyards. Over there, a train bridge, and the commuter rail carrying business people headed down town. The other way, Route 1 and a couple of miles of McDonald's, Bed Bath and Beyond,  and discount carpetlands. That way, the top of the Blue Hill. Another way, the distant ice of the Hancock Tower.

My Fairly Safe-ish Dangerous Youth

Yesterday, my brother and I, grown-ups both, spent a few minutes of our Fourth of July chortling in the kitchen (away from Nana's ears) about the great traditional tie between our national birthday, and doing goofy, unsafe stuff.

When we were in grade school, the two "big kids" on the street would sidle away from the eyes of parents and light off fireworks, recruiting us as the audience (they were smart enough to not to give them to little kids to hold, except sparklers). There was the fountain firework, which was pretty, and the cherry bombs, which they dropped in the sewer and made a giddy bang (probably would not make the  DPW or the taxpayers happy, either) , and the wonderful time we donated a toy Fischer Price Little People School Bus to the cause and they rolled it down the street exploding with fireworks and flames! I hope we took the little peg-headed passengers out first.

And my brother, since he was younger when us older kids went off to college, got the chance later to tag along with some cousins and uncles up at a lake in New Hampshire who would float out onto said lake in canoes, possibly fueled by beer, and light off their works from the canoes! Because that was stupider, and therefore, more fun!

I mean, that was stuff we weren't officially supposed to be doing! But there was SO much stuff we were let to do, which now has been relegated to the category of unsafe.  Even though everyone knows our Mom was "strict," and our Dad would (mostly) back her up and could yell really loud. Because these were all stuff that everybody did!

A Great Movie Scene for the Fourth

 

From "1776"

The Signing, Philadelphia.

"We are about the brave the storm in a skiff made of paper."

 

A People's History of the Fourth of July in Boston

Pops Concert By Garrett A. Wollman. (From The Archives @ BostonRadio.org) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Whilst scrubbing my grill, ordering three types of meat and other patriotic tasks, I find myself diving back into childhood memory of this national holiday. 

There are a few small-town Fourth memories, the times we were at the beach somewhere for the weekend. The parents would drive a car into a field of scratchy, dry sun-bleached grass, and settle us kids for the fireworks to come.  You could have convertibles and kids back then: not only did we not have car seats, we drove around with our precious little noggins caressed by the murderous highway breezes, HOW ABOUT THAT. 

So you could sit in that attractively unsafe car, or on an old blanket on the grass, and watch some part-time volunteer firemen--doubtless without the appropriate training--make pretty explosions in the sky.

Other times you got to have your big city Boston Fourth, heading downtown to Pops' giant bandshell to see their deathless leader, Arthur Fiedler, lead the storied band through a medley of Burt Bacharach, Broadway, and George M. Cohan hits that really heated up those World War One-era gramophones, plus a few Beatles tunes for those crazy kids.

Legend has it that when the Pilgrims first arrived upon the shores of Massachusetts, Fiedler emerged from the woodland shadows in his spotless band leader's suit with his snowy white mustache, and foretold that one day, a new nation would be born, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal, but that it would take a really, really long time for folks to get that through their heads.

Who Are the People in the Neighborhood? (JP Cut)

 

People you see in JP on a sunny Friday afternoon.

Guys with braids on bicycles. 

Guys on those tallbike things (when tatts and dork glasses are just not enough to announce your demographic niche).  Guys riding up to other guys with braids and slapping hands as if to say, yo is your band playing tonight, and did you see my girlfriend's knitted bike cozy she is selling on Etsy. No? Then check my Tumblr. That sort of handslap!

People going into the corner store for cigarettes and chips and cheap beer and money orders, and people going into coffee shops to co-work on their code for that site about crowdsourcing social change they won't finish before they head off to grad school.

Big Latin guys headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness. Little hippie non-profit women headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness.  

People headed to the co-op store for whole grain bread and hemp soap.  People headed to that Meatland store for pork sausage and the joy of shopping at a place called Meatland.

Parents taking their progressively-named children to Music Together classes (Emma Mae, please hold hands with Linus and Deliverance). People on their way to their Tribal Dance or Belly Dancing lesson (Note on schedule:  *Students must buy finger cymbals and a 3 yard silk veil from Susi to participate in this class.)

People headed to the Irish bar, the other Irish bar, the other again Irish bar with the mural and corned beef hash and eggs on Sunday, the Scottish bar, the bar in the former brewery that sometimes has a gay line dancing night now, but no more bowling.

Who you don't see:  the invisible people, who invest their lifeblood and InDesign skills in all those free newspapers stacked in the front of all Jamaica Plain businesses, toiling away in their mysterious dens somewhere, delivering their precious freemedia to the careless masses until they can no longer carry on and throw themselves from the top of the Brewery smokestack or move to New Hampshire to become Republican lumber yard owners.*  (* theory)

Yes.  It is a July afternoon in Jamaica Plain, and though I could muse upon the rivalrous charms of my own dear Roslindale, I am going to go to the Scottish bar instead.