Category Archives: Boston

It sat in the back of the car, padded like a delicate ticking bomb. One false step on the brake and we’d both be crushed. A heavy box of tools for the task at hand sat snugly beside the precious cargo. My partner in crime was calmer than me. I always worried more, happier to expect the worse and be granted a better outcome. Emotional insurance. You learn it after enough disappointments. We crawled along, the minutes growing tenser. Snarled in traffic at one point, we slowed to a stop. The weekend unfurled ahead. Lady Gaga was playing. My friend Skip was in the car and we talked about the plan.

He didn’t anticipate any problems. The biggest hurdle would be in getting the unit up the stairs, or so he explained. I had visions of much worse: trying and failing to dissemble what was already there, taking out some hapless passers-by below, or discovering that we lacked an essential tool or part to successfully complete the mission. As the traffic cleared, the day could be seen for the beauty that it was: sunny and warm and the perfect re-entry into Boston. We hadn’t been here together for almost exactly a year. And though a wise woman once remarked that you can never do the same twice, no matter how fierce, I held onto hope that this weekend would be just as fun and exciting as the very first time.

Before we could officially let loose however, there was the mission: installation of a new air conditioning unit. After over twenty years of faithful service (and a couple of seasons of very loud and noisy and rattling service) it was time for our very first AC to retire. I’d asked Skip if he would help me take out the old and install the new during our Boston Red Sox weekend, and he was game. (Get it???)

I had complete confidence that he knew how to make it happen, re-enforced by the serious tool set he brought along with him. We pulled up to the condo, unloaded the AC (the only hairy part of the ordeal thus far) and got back in the car to park. After a quick yet unanticipatedly-extensive beer run (who knew that they didn’t sell beer at the 7-11?) we made it back to the condo and headed into the sunlit bay-window of the bedroom, which housed a dusty old air conditioning unit that looked like it had been welded into place.

What served to solidify its placement and running all these decades was an installation job that required a whole lot more work than Skip originally envisioned. Long screws had been drilled through the metal framework of the window. Thick gobs of caulking, hardened into cement-like grips, ran around the entire unit and inside the window. Just when we thought we could pull the thing out, another screw revealed itself, embedded deeper within and requiring excavation. Carrying the thing upstairs soon seemed like a cakewalk compared to getting this beast free, but finally it budged.

I fanned myself and took a sip of a gin & tonic. (Thank goodness for Andy’s stock of Fevertree Tonic Water, and a fresh lime.) Watching all of this unfold was sweaty, draining work. A bit of dust from the old unit had settled on my shoe and I hastened to kick it off. I presented Skip with the next step: a support for the new AC, which was slightly heavier and larger than what formerly occupied the space. He installed it in no time, and soon we had the new unit in the window and running with ease. Instantly, the room felt cooler, and with the additional BTUs I could already discern a noticeable difference. Skip had just saved summer at the condo.

We went out to Boston Chops to celebrate, because when you do something that uses power tools you want a steak dinner with an endless stream of fries. You also want a cocktail and some red wine. And then you go on a gay bar crawl and get humiliated by your straight friend. But that’s another story for another post… and not in the upcoming Part 2 of this tale. Come back anyway.

Repeating a Red Sox weekend in Boston just once hardly counts as a tradition, but hopefully one day it will be. Like the Holiday Stroll with Kira, this is just too fun not to threepeat. But that’s getting ahead of things, and when you have a weekend as fun as the one Skip and I recently spent in Boston, we’re going to extend the joy I had in recounting it over a couple of posts.

For now, I’m posting a juxtaposition of last year’s game versus this year’s game as seen below. I look equally unimpressed in both, which just goes to show how deceptive appearances can be. In truth, I was having a blast in both instances. Skip just has a better way of showing it. (He was also the one taking the wretched photos, so he knew what was coming. I was caught unaware. Virgos hate surprises.) This year’s adventure had the added onus of having to install a new air conditioner (you’ll have to come back later today to see how that turned out…)

The unofficial kick-off to summer arrives with today’s holiday, and for a visual treat of how far we’ve come, check out these contrasting shots of Boston. Taken from our Braddock Park vantage-point, they illustrate the shift in seasons better than I could ever describe.

Winter, spring, summer or fall…

A boy I once liked very much said this was one of his favorite buildings in Boston. It was after our first and only date, and he had parked right in front. There was no good-night kiss, and no interest from his end. Of course I fell in love with him right on the spot.

Now I only find it pretty in certain light.

A boy I once liked very much said this was one of his favorite buildings in Boston. It was after our first and only date, and he had parked right in front. There was no good-night kiss, and no interest from his part. Of course I fell in love with him right on the spot.

Now I only find it pretty in certain light. And hindsight.

In fifth and sixth grades, one of my favorite moments of class was when we got to go to the library and read. There was a corner where the books on paranormal activity were kept, and I’d occasionally pick up a compilation on ghost hauntings and read a bit of it – only a bit, for I was soon too scared to turn the pages. Like the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable snowman, those ghost stories carried an unsolved mystery to them, the notion of something being off. They originated somewhere, there had to be something to them, but the veracity of it, the existence of such hidden evils, was always suspect. It was the only thing that kept me from going completely sleepless.

Black and white photographs of haunted staircases, of blanks walls covered in faded Victorian wallpaper, and doors slightly ajar, would come back to my mind at night, and I spent many hours frightened of every sound that emanates from a sleeping house. It wasn’t the existence of ghosts or monsters that horrified me, it wasn’t the damage they might do – it was the mystery of it. The absence of knowledge or proof was what bothered me, and that worked both ways. If it couldn’t be proven that they existed, how could it be proven that they didn’t exist? That same fear came to me the other day as I looked up at a poster of young man who was missing in Boston – Zachary Marr. On the platform of the Downtown Crossing Red Line, hordes of people rushed past his smiling image. He watched over all of them, as blind to their worries and concerns as they were to his, but I saw it all.

It had a title straight from clickbait hell: “Boston’s Mysterious Vanishing Men.” Of course I fell for it, then went down into a dark hole of conspiracy theories and paranoid speculation. For a few years, and in similar fashion, men in Boston were reported missing, then found dead a while later in a body of water – usually the Charles River or the harbor. In each instance, the men had gone off on their own, usually late at night, and often after a few drinks at a bar. They were all considered accidents, moments of drunken stumbling that resulted in unfortunate circumstances when a city has such easy access to water.

Still, something bothered me about these stories. Some vague underlying sense of dread and danger, some small seed of ‘What if?’ coupled with an inability to completely dismiss the connections made between cases. I don’t know the statistics, I don’t know how often such accidents happen. At the same time I find it hard to believe that such happenings are the work of some mastermind serial killer. As always, it’s the not knowing for certain that bothers me most. That’s what creeps into my head sometimes.

Boston’s lost boys, gone mysteriously missing then found in the water days or weeks later, haunt the most morbid corners of the mind, residing there partly resigned, partly pleading for help, partly at peace— or so we want to believe. It’s a haunting that spooks through its missing pieces, just like those ghost stories spun such fear through their very mystery.

I walk the streets and notice things differently now. The marks of men. The remnants of the lost. A single sock. A weathered Brooks Brothers collar point. A muddy comb missing several of its teeth. Ghostly items. Faded with weather and time and neglect. The forgotten. An eerie uneasiness settles over some nights now, and only when I lock the two formidable entry doors behind me do I feel a sense of relief.

UPDATE: Sadly, Zachary Marr’s body was just found in the Charles River.

When the snowstorm moved off at last, and the afternoon sun lit up the high-rise hotels, the scene was magnificent to behold. It was the sort of light most of us don’t get to see very much – the strange immediate appearance of the sun after a day of steady snowfall. Coupled with the rapid approach of dusk, the snow and ice took on layers of lavender – as pink and purple fought for dominance, and the fiery orb of salmon descended in the West.

It doesn’t often happen that the snow will alight so prettily on the branches and remain there. Usually it’s as fickle as the fluttering birds, especially when the wind begins. On this day, the wetness of the snow and the relative lack of wind allowed the beauty to last.

Looking like a cotton candy world, in the lightest shades of pink and blue, the effect is exquisite. It lasts only moments, as if such magnificence was not long for this universe. Soon, the light would depart, and dusk would take its place. An almost imperceptible shift if you watch as it happens, but dramatically obvious if you take your eyes away from it for any length of time.

The turn of the evening screw was at hand.