Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Shaking off the ickiness of an awkward and difficult lunch is only partly cured by a shopping excursion. That sort of balm requires beauty and flowers and the sweetness of a slow sun setting over the city which has never let me down. To those ends, Boston delivered a calming end to the day, as if to say that everything was going to be all right, everything was as it should be, and it was ok to simply pause and breathe and exist. 

Summer would come to Boston, just as spring had done, and there was no stopping or changing that. The upcoming BroSox Adventure with Skip is on the near horizon, while a birthday celebration in Boston with Andy is further down summer’s road. I’ll also be spending some time on my own in the city, like I used to do when Kira was in Florida. I’ve missed such solitude. We have all missed so much. 

It is enough to exist, to breathe, to simply be – and we need not share that with anyone or document it or do what I’m doing right now by blogging about it. For that reason, the summer may be outwardly quieter than usual, and maybe I’ll have fewer posts each week.  Perhaps that’s how this blog shifts into its own arc of winter, something that’s been hinted at and may finally be happening. Not that I’m planning on going anywhere anytime soon – some winters are a lifetime long. 

As I find myself back at Braddock Park, there is still light in the sky. It’s been quite a day – and all of this in a single day – so I take an early sleep. It is not a content one, however, as I’m restless and uneasy. My legs hurt from too much walking – so much so that I can’t find a position that is comfortable, and I toss and turn much of the night. When at last I drift off, a man starts screaming profanities outside on the street, waking me again. 

Giving up on sleep by 8 AM, I make the bed and head out for breakfast at Cafe Madeleine. Overnight the air has changed dramatically. All hints of summer have been sucked out of the atmosphere. It is chilly and overcast, like fall is back, like winter is coming, and the unease of the night spills into the new day. 

Still, the gardens remain in bloom, and their blooms will last longer this way. 

A number of years ago, I had made a trip to Boston to see Kira and wound up taking this same route to pick her up from work. Back then, my walk had taken place on a cold night in late fall, when most of the leaves were already down, and a chilly rain had fallen leaving puddles at every turn. What a change in such weather on this afternoon. With the heat rising, I walked through the center mall of Commonwealth Avenue, beneath the canopy of shade-giving trees, past the statues of historical noteworthiness, all the way to the entrance of the Boston Public Garden. In the midst of the glorious spring, I thought back to the last time we met in person – it must have been on this trip to Boston in January of 2020 – which was the last time I’d gone anywhere before COVID hit. I didn’t know the import of that trip, and how I would have to turn it into that year’s Holiday Stroll. 

Now, those memories mingled with the path of today, and they jarred me with a sense of sadness, a loss of that way of life. Maybe just for now, maybe for a while, maybe forever. Commonwealth met the Public Garden. I crossed the street and entered, wondering where Boston was sending me, what messages I was supposed to receive. 

“Take what you like, give what you want.”

The words were printed on this little stand that appeared as by magic in the midst of the Boston Public Garden. There was a message there. An important one, and a pertinent one. It holds true as much for friendship as for life. But there was something underlying it as well, a darker tone of ominousness that lurked right around the corner. I paused to take a photo of these puppets, spooked and slightly disturbed by them, as if they were some gingerbread house waiting to ensnare the unwary. Then I thought I should have more faith in people. As I walked around the stand, a person in a mouse’s costume sat next to it – I hadn’t seen them there and I was startled. Silent but for a nod, the human face beneath the mouse’s was barely discernible, and covered in lace, making for an even more disturbing visage. Backing away from the giant mouse, I came upon a trumpeter playing to no one in particular. 

If there was a message in his song, I could not hear it, and I felt like I was missing something, or going the wrong way. Still, I followed the path toward Beacon Hill, unwavering. Boston held its secrets usually for good reason. All would come right in the end, I had to believe. 

A fringe tree lowered its bowers and panicles of bloom – and suddenly a happy memory of Kira and I in this very garden came back to me. I’d unconsciously avoided the fringe tree I recalled – the one I made Kira pose in front of probably a decade ago. Now, inescapable and right in my way, I could not avoid it, or its sweet perfume. 

It smelled of the same intoxicating fragrance – bringing back that day, and other days even further back – in Suzie’s side yard, in the Wasilkowski’s front yard – in all these yards of childhood – and I wondered if life would be mostly memories from this point forward, and whether would that be entirely awful. 

At the end of the path, I crossed to Charles Street and followed it almost to the end, where a Thai restaurant – The King and I – had a table available for us. I sat down at the appointed time, and in a few minutes Kira walked in. It was the first time we had seen each other since January 2020. I sensed her to my right before I could bring myself  to look up to see her. Averting eye contact is my main tell of being upset with someone. 

So much had happened since that winter, and for so much we had been out of touch, as was her wont when things got difficult. I needed to talk to someone then, and she wasn’t there. Worse, she hadn’t shared what was going on in her life. Weaker friendships had fallen apart over far less, but so had stronger friendships. I knew this, and wanted us both to have an opportunity to address the last year and a half, and see where we were, and how we each wanted our friendship to continue. Could the pandemic have taken our friendship as one of its many casualties? For the first time, sitting across from her, I allowed the thought to cross my mind. 

We each spoke and we each listened. I felt our friendship still there, yet I felt it shift into something different. I also felt it hesitate and hold, and I embraced that. Such things weren’t to be decided or determined at a single lunch. We were not the rash young people we’d been when we first met in Boston in the fall of 1998. We would not yell and scream and storm out in a mad scene. We would not part in anger, nor would we part in happiness or resolution. Nothing is that easy anymore. We parted in a chilly uneasiness, unable to hug and stranded in our respective points of view. It was as bad, and as good, as it could have gone. For once, I expected the actual outcome, and it came to pass. 

It didn’t feel good, but it felt right, for now. In the past, when I’ve felt similar sadness, I’ve found my way to some body of water, to feel grounded, to feel connected to this world. Hastening my pace, I walked all the way to Boston Harbor, where I once walked after a guy I thought I loved didn’t love me back. On this day, I sought the coolness of the sea, to clear my head and help me see.

This was a different sense of loss – not quite complete, not nearly resolved – and I wondered at what other people had given up, willingly and unwillingly, over the past year and a half. There was a hardness in myself that wasn’t there back then – I felt it, and it was a good thing. It had gotten me through. In many ways there was less I was willing to accept, and in some ways there was more. Both seemed to be working against Kira and I hanging out for the moment, and that was ok. Part of me isn’t ready to hang out with people again anyway. 

Turning my back to the sea, I let the water keep some of my anguish, and then let some retail therapy work its magic like only shopping can. Emerging from the almost-bustle of downtown, I found my way back to Public Garden, feeling more grounded and more certain than a couple of short hours ago.

It’s been well over a year since I’ve made a solo-overnight trip to Boston, and with my friendship with Kira in the balance, it was time. After looking at the weather, I moved this quick journey up by a day, so I’d have most of Thursday in town, while the sun was shining and the weather was warm. That turned out to be proper planning, as the city as alight in blossoms and beauty until I departed the next day. 

All the little squares before the brownstones were filled with flowering shrubs and plants. These tiny gardens, some protected by wrought iron gates and fences (which lend an even more inviting atmosphere with their dare-to-defy-it air of the forbidden) are often bathed in dappled sunlight, giving a feeling of shaded relief from a hot day. 

After parking the car, I walked through the bloom-festooned Southwest Corridor Park and stopped by the condo, where I peered out the window and looked down on this Chinese dogwood. One of the few times I’ve been afforded such a vantage point, it was a lovely welcome back to the city I love, and in which I still manage to find new enchantments, even if it’s in the simple turn of a new view-point. 

My main purpose for this trip was to see Kira, and see what could be done to improve or mend our slightly-frayed friendship. She’d gone through some difficult times in the fall of 2020, and basically stopped corresponding without explanation or reason. It’s her usual method of operation, but in 2020 I was having troubles of my own – who wasn’t? – and I relied on simple texting and phone calls with friends to keep me going. She wasn’t there for that at a time when I really needed it, and I know she was going through stuff of her own, which is why it would have been more timely and important to connect then. She tends to push friends away at those times, and normally I let that happen – this time was different. We’d gone several months without getting in touch, and my sadness began to be shaded with anger and annoyance. Not one to be rash or quick to end a decades-old friendship, however, I wanted to re-connect and see what we could do to make things right again. 

Usually, I’d have invited Kira to spend the weekend with me at the condo, but this was a different world, and that just wasn’t possible. All I could do was meet up with her for a lunch near her workplace, so I made my way to Beacon Hill. 

Taking my time, I peered into the garden plots along the way, pausing to take a picture, or sniff an iris, or just to let a memory make itself known, and remembered. 

Boston is filled with such ghosts for me, especially now. They are mostly happy conjurings, accompanied by wistful half-smiles, and sometimes little chuckles. The older I get, the more they tend to move me, and the sadder ones feel more poignant with the passing of time, and the arrival at places closer to wisdom and acceptance. On this day, I recalled the ghosts of Kira and myself – and the much-younger and less-formed shapes of the people we would one day become. I protected those memories, and set up a fortress around the past, much like these little iron gates that forbid access to the flowers and plants that stood behind them. I just couldn’t tell if I was putting up gates to delineate the past from the present, or whether this was an ending or a temporary protection. It was a beautiful and bittersweet befuddlement, and Boston would send me on another journey that answered far fewer questions than it raised…