A Wicked Fun Time in Boston

Last week I took a four-day jaunt Northward from Connecticut to visit my good friend Max in the Boston area (Belmont, to be precise), and renew my age-old love affair with Harvard Square.  The weather was unseasonably warm, the skies were blue, and it was wonderful to stroll through that little warren of streets charged with collegiate energy, retail in sentimental convection, and immutable red-brick facades.  We had lunch at the good old Border Cafe, coffee at a new arrival called Mike’s Pastry, took a walk along the Charles...

Max is always good for unusual entertainment, and he led me to a very “Harvard Square” event: Trash Night at the Brattle Theater.  This institution consists of airing an epochally bad movie and encouraging the audience to yell jokes and comments at the screen, like a live, ad-lib Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The theater was packed with nerds of all ages, the “film” was a mid-1980s abortion called “Space Rage,” filmed on location in some dirt lots using dune buggies with cardboard shells, and the impromptu commentary rang out fast and furious.  The main movie was interrupted with a few artistic “commercials” made by the organizers, little two-minute whimsies assembled from period clips that managed to be more surreal than the movie itself.  It was great fun and I recommend Trash Night to anyone with an appetite for kitch if they find themselves within range.

On another night we went out with two other old friends of mine, Cherie and Susan, to an event more properly “Boston”—a trivia contest at a sports bar (the Cherry Tree).  This was no minor-league trivia contest: it had named teams, printed blanks on which to write answers, “hint” songs played over the stereo, and a complicated five-round scoring system.  Max and the other regulars were delighted to have me along for the “Sports” category, but I would only have been useful for baseball questions and alas the “Sports” ones thrown at us were for football.  Our team finished woefully, but by then I’d had two pints of Sam Adams and was quite satisfied.  The next day the Yankees won their playoff against the Indians, which also satisfied me, though being in Boston I kept quiet about it.

Visiting Boston is always an exercise in nostalgia for me: I’ve lived in the area three separate times, dating back to my days attending boarding school at my beloved Cambridge School of Weston, where Max and I first met.  On one sunny afternoon Max and I decided what the heck, we would dial the nostalgia meter all the way up (or back, as it were), and we drove out to our old school, top-down in the Miata.  Though the Cambridge School was in session, the place was oddly deserted--most of the students, we saw, were gathered at the lower fields for a soccer game--and we were able to walk at will through the little campus of grassy lawns, wooded slopes, and buildings both new and familiar.  The big modern Art & Science center, a recent addition, was admirable but had displaced a belt of woods integral to the geography of memory; my old dorm under the pines, however, had thankfully become only more decrepit since 1980.

     Newboys, my old dorm

Personal journeys.  Visiting an old school is always a re-measuring of life against potential, and rare must be the alumnus who comes out from that stroll ahead.  I will say that it was satisfying to revisit CSW in my yellow Miata on the return loop of a great road trip through Mexico.  That’s the kind of thing that looks good in alumni magazine blurbs.  But like the Yankees, who went on from their playoff victory to lose to Houston and fall short of the pennant, my return loop brings me closer to greater dissatisfactions: my unfinished novel, my unsold land in Connecticut, my shaky prospects for finding work when I return home.  Reality approaches: in many ways my future is up in the air. 

But I still have a month of my road trip left!