I love flying from CA to Boston, because it starts feeling like home as soon as people start gathering at the gate: the people somehow start looking like people who wear big, heavy winter coats half the year. On my most recent flight, I noticed immediately that an unusual percentage of the people were reading real books. Best-sellers, mostly, but not mass-market airplane books: The Corrections, Empire Falls, stuff like that. And the flight attendent commented on my book and we had a whole conversation about it. When we arrived, a significant number of people were still reading at the baggage claim. SFO to Boston may be the most literary air travel route in the country, and I looove it.
However, they've changed the T all around since I've been gone. The Silver Line? What is that about?? And the new BART-style tickets?* I don't approve. Luckily, all seemed back to normal as soon as I left the airport vacinity. *I am loyal to the token, but the new paper tickets do have Charlie, the man who never returned, on them, and I think that is kind of cute.
I got off the T at a station I'd never been to before, Stonybrook, and felt a huge wash of happiness as soon as I saw the three-story Victorians quietly absorbing summer rain under a row of tossing green trees. Those houses really do a number on me in a kind of primordial way. They say "home," and "why don't you rearrange your life right now so that you can live in one of us, because what else could be more important?" My friend Emily G lives in a wonderful apartment in one of those houses, in what seems to be a really great neighborhood in Jamaica Plain called Hyde Square (because every place in Boston is a square). It's funny that it's so familiar even though I've never been here before.
As soon as I arrived, I fell asleep on her super-comfy couch (which she made) listening to the rain outside the window and feeling incredibly content. Exhausted from family reunions and a night on the red-eye, I slept until 4:00. I'm trying to bank up some sleep for the Loaf. Does it work that way if you really, really try?
Right when I left the T at Stonybrook, the man giving away the Boston Metro thanked me for my smile. I am home!
2 comments:
Yes- Isn't Boston the only sensible place to be? Your blog just made me sooo homesick. What the hell is the Silver line though?
Charlie, your sandwiches! That is very cute. At least if you have to give up tokens, you get a story with your ticket.
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