Even on a grey day such as today, Boston Garden is cloacked in a myterious, dark, and illusive beauty. A few days ago the weather was warm, spring-like, a ruse. By today, things had changed; it was cold again. But we ventured downtown anyway, hoping to catch some of the promise of what’s to come, if not the actual thing itself.
From Charles Street, we walked around the Garden to Park Street, a warm coffee and lots of pastry (it was time to break our Lent fast), and then into the Garden, meandering and talking, books and travel mainly, new books she had bought, among them The French Leiutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (one of my Books-to-Live-and-Love-by), and my current read, Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone.
And then the conversation turned to travel, and why we love it so much, my niece and I, and the cities we love and the ones (some very close to Boston) which we don’t care much about. Cities we love–they give us back something; they give us back ourselves but in new shapes and forms and possibilities. For what are we if not several people, doing battle amongst our various selves?
Cities we love, like Boston, most of the time. On a day like this, crisp and dark and full of disillusionment but also so alive with people–all ages, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, all eccentricities, including the grunge man in black with bare feet skipping across the concrte, or the young woman in heels so high you’d think she is talking to God on this holy day, or the dishevelled old man, his eyes mad with madness, his mouth incapable of speech. And in the midst of all that, the little conversations across the generations.
A sweet afternoon, in the grey of our city, in the eclipse of the sun, in the promise of what is surely to come in all its glory soon, very soon. It’s just a matter of time, really. It always is.~~
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