Call Me Ishmael. No, really, you should.

This was a week for madness.  It began with the drunk guys who couldn't decide if they wanted more to relieve themselves on the sidewalk or beat up Andrew and take his watch. It ended with 2 crazy people -- one who was so drunk that he couldn't tell the police officer what day it was when she came to chase him out of the subway for panhandling, another who was so wasted at 8 AM that he was singing "AYE AYE AYE AYE" over and over and -- get this -- FOLLOWING US.  From one train car to another to another. . .we could not get away from him. So by the time we got out of the subway, another unwashed stumbling guy began making his way toward us when I looked his direction and said "If ONE MORE CRAZY PERSON approaches me, I am GOING TO SCREAM." He about fell down the steps then but left us alone. We sat down on a bench to consult a map near Boston Common and another drunk man (this one had vomited and/or poured Vodka down his shirt -- I know because he was still carrying the glass bottle) came straight up to me and began to babble incoherently. I started waving my arms and yelling at him too -- "I can't take this crazy city one minute longer! If you are a crazy person, DO NOT APPROACH ME!! Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!" And of course he stumbled off as well.

So it was beyond time for a break from the metropolitan loveliness that is Boston. We hopped on a train to Gloucester, Massachusetts on Cape Ann and left the skyline all behind, embracing Judith Sargent Murray's bright yellow house and the charm of the seaport town she once called home.  Since it's an active port, there's little for tourists to do there -- thank heavens -- so we took a Whale Watching tour. Incredible.

The boat goes about 1 million miles an hour to lose the coastline -- of course, whales don't frolic in shallow shores unless they're in trouble -- and we were driving into a headwind. The boat tipped, plunged, rocked, rolled, and dived. It had no mercy for any of us.  Thank the good Lord for my past boating experiences and a little patch called "Transderm Scop" that keeps a weakling like myself from throwing herself overboard. Everyone else was green to the gills. I got soaked with saltwater, the harsh mineral lashing at my face and drying in my hair, making it stiff, but I couldn't think of a cooler place to be.

Then, we saw the whales. 10 humpback whales, mainly calves, moms, and "escorts."  And while they didn't do any acrobatics, they did show us a few fins. I have a video but blogger for some reason is making it impossible to post. I, along with the camera, crew, and other tourists, pitched and rolled with the waves. If I ever get it posted, I recommend dramamine if you get curious.

Urban Patchwork

We board the bus and it's pitch-black outside, another chunk of daylight gone from a long commute. A drunk man presses up against me and everyone he's near but is strangely polite about it. When he gets off the bus, a couple of boys run from it, rather than boarding it, and I pause only a second to think how odd that is before I hear pop pop pop pop pop. I find myself and the rest of the bus flat on the floor. My bones go hollow. Even after I smell the sulphur -- fireworks -- I cannot stand.

When I go to work in the morning, a security officer at the bank I pass by never fails to greet me.  "Have a happy Thursday!" he says. In a city where men usually say things like a construction worker did the other day -- "Hey you I gotta hole in my pants wanna come stand in front of me?"--  I am always surprised to be greeted the way the security officer greets me. 

I step over a woman painting white doves on the sidewalk. These doves are on pavement all over the city. They're beautiful and they're outlined in purple and they say "Spread Peace Stop Violence." Another woman uses her lunch break every day to go outside of a church in Copley square to place one stone on a heap of stones for each soldier dead in Iraq. She prays over each one. She will be up to 17,000 before the year's end. 

A young man runs the front desk at the library I'm visiting. Inside the room, he's a wart. "Don't let that corner of your folder hang over the edge of the desk," he says, thumping it back into place.  Sometimes he picks up my papers, jumbles them, and says, "You MUST keep this folder in ORDER."  When I go to lunch with the fellows, never failing to feel like a wannabe since I am, he makes jokes with me about the pizza or the veggie burgers. I wonder if he has a secret twin.

I learn the secret of a Boston accent. Abandon all "R's." I like to try new words  -- Glah-stuh; Woo-stuh; Bah-stahn -- but still have trouble substituting "heah" for "here." My "r's" and "ee's" and "aa's" are too loud and long and they betray me. I try to stay quiet but have never been good at that.

I come across a titillating find. I discover one of the women in my dissertation was a Revolutionary war spy for the British. I've found a spy letter she received from a Scotsman in jail for treason. I find evidence she's hidden a response in a jar of hair powder. I struggle to decipher who "the Great" is. Andrew and I crack her code. We feel triumphant.

Come on Ride My Trolley Trolley

So you might wonder if I'm up here doing any work at all, since I haven't been posting about my research, which I do every day but weekends, but I do in fact have a routine. For instance, I have to ride the T every morning to work and every evening back home to Roslindale. But sometimes people shake up the day-to-day for me a little, and I usually admire the change of pace. 

So yesterday was a particularly good example of this. Somehow, we got on the train at rush hour, which we don't usually do, and the subway was stuffed with sweaty bodies. We could barely get on, and while this wasn't completely unusual, especially before a Sox game, the train conductor's handling of the situation was.  Although all the conductor USUALLY says is "rugglesnextstopdoorsopenontheleft," this conductor said "MAKE WAY MAKE WAY EVERRRYBODY! I see some ROOOM in there and I know you SEE IT TOO." When everyone just looked puzzled at the other train occupants -- there was in fact no room -- he started to sing.  "Come on ride my Trolley Trolley," he said. "My Trolley Trolley Trolley!" Andrew turned to me and asked, "If you have to report suspicious activity to the train conductor, who do you tell if the conductor is acting suspiciously?"  A good question.

Every morning on my way to work, I pass a young woman -- I'd say 22 or 23 -- walking down the sidewalk holding a hand mirror up to her face. It's the size of her head, and I have no idea how she sees where she's going, or what she's looking at while she walks, or if she's ever been hit by a bus during this routine.  I  have come up with a few theories as to why she does it, though. Maybe she got a new face after a disaster, and somehow can't rectify this new identity with the old one.  Or maybe she's psyching herself up for the daily grind. Or maybe she's in love with her own eyelashes. Maybe before I leave, I'll ask her.

Today I read about a woman trapped in Cambridge in 1775 on a farm besieged by soldiers. Her husband fled to England, leaving her behind, and I got to read all her letters bawling him out for being a utter loser.  Her name was Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman and she was super-wealthy -- a shopkeeper fortunate enough to have drafted a prenup in the 18th century! -- and when her gem of a husband Ralph left her to the English soldiers, she took all of his money with her, and survived, and cut him out of her will for spite.  I love my job. 

Salem, Or, Indecent Exposure

Today was the day for Salem, Massachusetts, a wild and weird way to spend Andrew's 29th birthday. As a fan of Halloween and ghost stories, I thought it would be right up my alley. Not so.

When we got off the train, we should've known the day would be odd when we came across a group of people dressed in costumes pretending to stone each other, leading a group of bewildered tourists toward a gallows that had been erected in the middle of the square.  When the crazies finally got the mob to the gallows -- a mob a little too eager to see an unjustified death, I might add -- the reenactors suddenly stopped, telling everyone they had to pay a ticket if they wanted to see the actual murder, which would take place inside. Cheese. Weird cheese.

We passed a tarot shop and a series of places selling lame t-shirts and funny-colored stones. I had to admire one shirt that had a picture of one of the "witches" being strung up, with onlookers cheering on the murder, and under the picture was printed one word: "Oops." 

So we go to the main attraction there in Salem, which is the Salem Witch Museum, where they usher you into a circular room and turn off the lights. All around the room, up high toward the ceiling, the museum has erected little scenes from the witch trials, which light up and speak when its time to tell that part of the story. Slightly lame, but props for a gesture toward creativity. The best part though was when we exited the exhibit, we were ushered through to one of the weirdest places I've ever been.

It's a triangular room, part of the museum, meant to dispel current stereotypes about witches.  It begins with movie posters pasted to the wall -- the Wizard of Oz, Macbeth, and so on -- and the guide points to them and accuses them of giving witches a bad rap.  Then she shows you a lit-up witch with a green face that says "Hollywood has done me wrong." Then the guide shows you a timeline that has "Western" dates on top of it -- when Christ was born, when Christians started persecuting witches, when Nancy Reagan approved space travel -- and "pagan" dates on the bottom -- when Stonehenge was probably created, when witches started being hung for their beliefs, etc. Only the pagan part of the timeline was oddly missing dates.

The last wall was the BEST.  It was a series of equations.  It said "God/Satan + fear = witch trials; Ignorance + McCarthy = red scare; infection + AIDS = the gay community."  We didn't really have anything to say to that, but we overheard one couple discussing the complete and utter ridiculousness of it.  One woman said, "I don't think that adds up." Her companion said, without irony,  "It's on the WALL so it MUST BE TRUE!"

The exhibit ended with plastic talking pagans who said, "Please ask us what we believe when we see you on the street. We don't believe in the devil. And please don't use the word 'warlock,' as it means 'traitor.'"  

Very, very, very odd.

We couldn't get out of Salem fast enough, and it turns out, we would have quite a bit of trouble getting home too. When we arrived at the bus stop to take us home in Roslindale, two drunk guys accosted us, threatening to expose themselves, which one actually did, and steal Andrew's watch or beat him -- whichever he decided would be more "fun."  In an effort to get away from these baffoons, we tried to take a taxicab, but we should've known we were in trouble when he elbowed his friend and grinned before letting us in.  He took the "scenic" route to say the least -- all the way through the arboretum, about 3/4 to 1 mile out of the way -- before depositing us at our street. Andrew, who was by this point exhausted and not a little furious from the culmination of the day's activities, asked for all of his change back, and the taxidriver, no doubt insulted and miffed he hadn't fooled us, chunked the change at us through the window, spitting and cursing as he did so. 

Is it your Birfday?

Happy Birthday to Andrew, who is 29 today, and is the reason the sun shines for me every morning. 

Andrew spent his birthday in the weirdest town in North America. Roswell, move over. You have nothing on Salem. But that is for another day.

Sold Out

Yesterday was the perfect day to visit John and Abigail Adams's house, and so we did. 

We happily marched up to the visitor's center in Quincy, which took about an hour to reach, only to be greeted by an avid enthusiast's worst nightmare:  tour tickets sold out.  I approach the desk.  "I love Abigail Adams. I'm writing about her in my dissertation, and I came all the way from Mississippi to 'see' her. Is there anything you can do?"  The woman gestured helplessly toward the mass of  people in the waiting room.  "No."  

But I hate no.  I'm an only kid, so I bristle at the word.  I turn to the group I'm with and say, "We're going to see Abigail."  And so, we begin a 45-minute hike to her house, where we encounter a giant tour group standing outside of her birthplace.  A very odd thing is happening. The tourists are Japanese, and the tour guide is yelling the same thing over and over to them in English, although they clearly don't understand him, as they are just standing in the same spot he's asking them to move away from.  A youngish guy, about 26 or 27, is running up and down the street in front of them, singing.  One way, he sings, "I'M SO EXCITED....AND I JUST CAN'T HIDE IT. . ." while skipping, staring at the tourists the entire time. On his way back, he did the same thing, only he changed the words: "J - F - K - WAS A GREAT PRESIDENT OH YEAAHHHH."  The tourists just blinked at him.

I went up to the tour guide and said everything in a rush. "I know I'm not supposed to be here but I write about Abigail Adams I mean I'm writing a dissertation and I love her and I've always wanted to see where she was her space I mean I HAVETOSEEWHERESHEWROTEHERLETTERS."  He just looked at me sideways.  "You WALKED here?" he asked. I took a deep breath. "Yes." 

He set us aside and looked around cautiously.  The tourists left, and in between groups his friend, Will, gave us a tour.  "If you want to see where they married, you'll need to do the same thing at the next house. Grovel. Plead," he suggested. So we did. 45 minutes into town, 15 minutes to Abigail and John's married house. 

"WE WALKED ALL THE WAY FROM THE BIRTHPLACE" was all I could get out when we finally made it there.  "Jesus!" the guide said. "Sit down."  She disappeared into the carriage house behind the Adams mansion and returned with a piece of cardboard that said "Four complimentary tickets."  She liked our enthusiasm. And I got to stand in the very place where Abigail Adams ate, laughed, made butter, even breathed her last breath.  

So this day wouldn't have been remotely possible without the patience of the people traveling with me, or the benevolence of the guides working at the Adams estates.  Here's to big-hearted humanity and all lovers of literature for making one dream of mine come true.

So This One Time I Met a Blind Man

On my way to the Trader Joe's Grocery Store in Brookline, I came across a tall, rotund blind man with white eyes and fluttering eyelids walking into the middle of a very busy intersection.  As I had just seen him slam into a Walgreen's door three times, I was keenly aware that he didn't have this "no sight" business down pat quite yet.  Either he was suicidal, or he wasn't aware that the white walking stick that led him was smacking the tires of cars that were about squish him. So, I grabbed his arm and pulled him backwards onto the sidewalk.  

"Would you like help crossing the street?" I asked, thinking someone, maybe my mom or my Sunday School teacher, might be happy I offer. 

"Why yes," he said, and promptly grabbed me by the breast. "I would."