Boston Love

The randomness of the streets laid out as they grew, organically, in this Neighborhood City. Home of the Midnight Ride; small enough to bike anywhere; the Walkable City. And first in North America: the T, where every language is spoken, and which originally had Rapid in it’s name–until a rider sued on the grounds that it was not fast enough to be billed as Rapid, and the name was changed to avoid legal culpability: only in Boston. Same as the Boston University Bridge, the only spot in America where a boat can sail under a train tracking under a car driving under an airplane flying overhead.

Nor’easters, April blizzards, lightning rainsoaks, and that’s just Monday. Leaf peepers, that inimitable Autumn wind, and concurrent Concord grapes. Trying to remember the poem in order to tell the weather forecast by the old John Hancock Tower’s light. The Atlantic in the air. The Emerald Necklace; the Regatta and Copley’s Ducklings. The Parade; meaning every one of them.

More world reknown schools than can be listed, and if you can’t show up or don’t have the cash, EdX. 364.4 plus or minus Smoots across the bridge, because yes, we’re including you’re failed annextations too; the Blaschka Glass Flowers; and Makey Makey. Watching the Green Monster, under the Citgo Sign, eating Sportsbars. Wally’s, with the Berklee folk blowing horns to retain the stage. Mark Sandman fronting Morphine at Newbury Comics, the Hatch Shell, or Central Square, singing “you speaka my language.” Yeah, that’s right, Bahston English, even the cahs, they can pahk in the front yahd all day long. Mark Morris’s Dance Group, at the Wang, on your first homeless night, is Dor itself. Radiohead at Foxborough Stadium, with big bellied jets suspended in the sky to the right of the stage, a light show you can’t buy. Any author you want to hear read, and one of your favorites sipping joe late nite, at the Tasty, before Good Will Hunting even, (it of the SCN vendor in the outdoor café photographic memory conversation shot). V-day at the YMCA Theatre with Cambridge Cooperative, and Papercut Zines at Lorem Ipsum; the BPL’s otherworldly marble courtyard, the see through CPL; Labrary, and the Mapparium.

Writing this in warm, dusty gusts of spring, papers blowing away from the park bench; inky petals in dappled sunshine. Treebuds landing beside my pen which the breeze licks up, and deposits where? How far? Little fringed pitches, as small as ideas, waiting to bloom, anything’s possible in this Miracle City, uniquely Miracle City.

—J. Marechal