Category Archives: Cambridge, Mass.

A tale of the city, part one

Before a church meeting today, J— asked me why I hadn’t yet written about the recent gang violence in New Bedford [Link]. I said because if I wrote right now, it would be too negative. But her question got me to thinking about violence in cities, and that got me to thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago. And if you bear with me, I’ll eventually get back to what’s going on in New Bedford right now.

Back on May 20, Carol and I were staying up in Cambrindge, and we walked from Porter Square to Inman Square, and then kept walking down Cambridge Street. All of a sudden, I felt funny, and I turned to Carol and said, “This neighborhood isn’t safe.” She didn’t understand why I said that, or why I felt that way — it was a beautiful sunny day, no one looked threatening, the neighborhood hadn’t really changed. And then I realized what was going on.

Back in February, 1992, I got called for jury duty, and I was empanelled on a jury that was going to deliberate in a murder trial. It was actually a relief to hear the trial would probably take three weeks:– I was working for a carpenter, he had no work to speak of, I was already down to three days a week; and if I served on a jury, the state would pay me fifty bucks a day for the duration of the trial.

On the first or second day of the trial, they took us all on a bus to go out and see where the murders had taken place. One of the two people murdered was Rigoberto Carrion. He was stabbed while walking through a housing project off Cambridge Street late at night, and managed to stagger out onto Cambridge St., and collapsed in the middle of the street at a set of traffic lights.

I saw those traffic lights, and that’s when I started to feel funny, and that’s when I said to Carol that the neighborhood we were walking through wasn’t safe. I had seen those traffic lights for all of five minutes through a bus window at the beginning of that trial in 1992. But the memory was still clear enough fourteen years later to set my nerves on edge when I walked by….

Part two of the story…

Inman Square

The sun stayed out this afternoon in spite of dark puffy clouds moving by.

“You rarely see that any more,” said Carol.

She was looking across Cambridge Street. I knew what she was talking about from her tone of voice. Three young men, maybe in their late twenties, had just gotten out of a cab. The cab stopped in the middle of the traffic lane just as the light turned green. The last man out of the cab, a tall man with fuzzy blond hair, aviator-style sunglasses, tight jeans, and a funky leather jacket, did not rush.

“You don’t see men walking with such a swagger any more,” said Carol. “And look at his two friends. They’re nothing special, a little schlumpy.”

They were schlumpy, just ordinary guys with ball caps and t-shirts stretched over slightly rounded bellies. One of them lit a cigarette, but you didn’t even notice those two guys, because the guy with the swagger and the fancy leather coat drew your attention. They kept walking up a side street. We walked past a man and a woman explaining MassPirg to passersby, and went into a coffee house.

The coffee house appeared to be crowded. I grabbed a table while Carol got coffee. It wasn’t really crowded, though: there were lots of table with just one person sitting working at a laptop or writing or reading a newspaper. A man near us stood up to go. I waited to see if he’d leave his newspaper, but he picked it up and tucked it under his arm.

The tall thin barista whose blonde hair was dyed vermillion came down the aisle and cleaned off his table. She picked up trash from the other tables where people were still sitting: “Are you done with that?… I’ll take that if you want….” She squeezed her way through the tables back to the counter.

The young man at the table immediately to my right stood up. “Excuse me,” he said to the red-haired waitress, following her as she walked towards the counter. “Excuse me. Excuse me, you’re bleeding.”

She looked down at her hand. Blood was running along one finger. “Oh,” she said cheerfully, “You’re right, I am. Uh, thank you.” She walked behind the counter and showed her hand to a co-worker, a short quiet woman. “I’m bleeding,” she said, smiling.

The young man picked the key for the men’s room. The young woman who was with him stood up and walked over to the counter. “Excuse me, do you have something to clean off the table?” She had a pronounced accent, perhaps from Latin America. The short woman behind the counter looked at her inquisitively. “There’s blood on our table,” said the woman with the accent, smiling.

I watched the MassPirg woman through the front window of the coffeehouse. She peeled off the blue MassPirg t-shirt she wore over her hooded white shirt. She laughed and said something to the MassPirg man, and they walked off in separate directions — the end of the work day, I suppose.

Carol and I had finished our coffee. “Ready to go?” I said. She smiled and nodded. We went out, and walked down to Kendall Square in the warm May sunlight.

In the cemetery

From the base of the tower, the highest point in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, you can usually see Boston. But late this afternoon all you could see was low clouds and maybe a little fog in some of the hollows of Cambridge. It was a lousy day to go looking for warblers, but this was the only free day I had.

I walked around for half an hour and the only birds I could see well enough to identify were some American Robins. The light was bad, and mostly I just saw silhouettes. I could hear birds all around me though. Good birders can identify hundreds of birds by ear. Not me; all I know is a couple dozen of the more common ones. Mewing: Catbird. Konk-a-ree: Red-Winged Blackbird. Cheeriup, cheeriee: American Robin. A few others.

After an hour I had managed to see a few birds, but no warblers. The whole reason you go to Mt. Auburn Cemetery in the spring is to see warblers; it’s nationally famous for being a spring warbler trap. I was about to leave when I heard a lazy song that sounded something “zee zee zee zee zoo zee,” the “zee”s all on one note, and the “zoo” perhaps a major second lower. I had been camping up in Maine early one July, in a campsite in a pine grove, and I used to hear that lazy song every morning right at sunrise: “zee zee zee zee zoo zee” over and over again; or sometimes “zoo zoo zee zoo zee.” I had finally tracked the bird down: Black-throated Green Warblers who had been nesting right next to my campsite. Here they were in Cambridge, lazily calling from somewhere up in one of the trees.

“Zee zee zee zee zoo zee.” I tried to figure out where the bird was sitting. I walked around in a big circle, trying to triangulate. “Zee zee zee zoo zee.” There were at least two; one of them seemed to be moving further away. Once I thought I had the nearer one spotted; I brought my binoculars up; but then I heard it from the next tree over, lazily calling “zee zee zee zee zoo zee.” At last I gave up, and went back to the car. You don’t always have to see things to know they’re there.

For my mom, who was a birder; today would have been her 82nd birthday.

Anecdote

A couple of nights ago, we went over to Freestone’s at six. The bar was pretty full, and a courteous older man moved over so we could sit in two contiguous seats. I ordered scallops, and Carol drank orange juice and tonic water (she had eaten earlier, so she stole from my plate instead of ordering). We chatted about this and that, the bar emptied out, and eventually we wound up chatting with the courteous man who had moved over for us. He was from Boston, “an old Boston Brahmin family,” he said. We agreed that the world view of Bostonians ends at the Connecticut River. He told us that when he had gone to UCLA to do doctoral work, an elderly relative of his had exclaimed: Poor boy, you’ll be so far from the ocean out there. “She didn’t realize that there’s another whole ocean out there! It’s even bigger than the ocean here!” he said. Now I have heard this exact same anecdote told any number of times, but never with the level of detail he brought to it: he gave the name of the person who had said it and when she had said it, and he claimed to be a direct witness because she had said it to him. Perhaps he had worked this old anecdote into his own memories of leaving New England; perhaps the incident as he told it was actually the original of that now-widespread anecdote; perhaps his elderly relative had heard the anecdote and used it knowingly, with that extremely dry humor of some elder New Englanders which young people take too literally. So I just had to tell him the anecdote about Mrs. Cabot of Boston, who had to entertain Mrs. Smith of Ohio while Mr. Cabot did business with Mr. Smith; Mrs. Cabot said, “And where did you say you come from, Mrs. Smith?”; “Ohio,” said Mrs. Smith; whereupon Mrs. Cabot said, “Mrs. Smith, here in Boston we pronounce it ‘Iowa’.” He did not particularly care for my anecdote, perhaps because it was all too evidently made up.

Spring watch

We’re staying in a Cambridge apartment today, and signs of spring are everywhere: purple and yellow croci blooming down the street, forsythia about to bloom, a sprig of pussy willow with big fat gray catkins that someone place in a vase in the entryway to this floor.

Astute reader Craig pointed out a recent article in the Kane County Chronicle: the owls are back nesting in a larch tree outside the old courthouse in Geneva, Illinois. [Link] Last year, I was living in Geneva and wrote about the owls as a sign of spring [Link]. Good to know that spring is indeed coming in Geneva as well as here in Massachusetts.

Another Friday night

I made it up to Cambridge at about 7, picked up Carol at the sub-let, and we went out to eat at Whole Foods in north Cambridge. You can get a decent meal there that’s cheaper than going to a restaurant, and with much better people-watching.

I opened up a tray of cheap sushi. Carol stole a piece of my avocado roll, then started on her chicken soup. Two young women, both blondish, apparently sisters stood at a cash register nearby: both smiled readily but both had a firm set to their mouths that I felt indicated strong wills.

Look, said Carol, that woman has mesh bags. Three youngish people shopping together, all with pale skin, milling about as their groceries got rung up; they had mostly vegetables and bulk food. I said, I used to use mesh bags all the time, but then I had two break on me and I stopped trusting them. Carol said, They have canvas bags too — look, that one has a beautiful design (drawing of a moon and plants, labeled “People’s Coop, Ann Arbor”).

Carol went to get another cup of coffee. A middle-aged man walked by, thick lenses in his glasses, medium brown skin, friendly expression, half-smiling half-bemused; I characterized him in my mind as a software engineer, though I had no good reason for doing so.

A slight woman wearing a Muslim head scarf and an employee apron kept walking past us, apparently a manager overseeing the cash registers. She was short but there was no sense of her being small.

Carol got up to ask one woman where she had bought her boots. The answer: Filene’s, five or six years ago. Carol sat down and said, I should have asked her what brand they were.

The food was long gone. Carol downed the last of her coffee. We got up and left. Another cheap date for Friday night.

Spring watch

Close to 70 degrees again today, with beautiful sun. Carol has been subletting one of the units in Cambridge Cohousing, and as we ate breakfast we could watch one of the residents disassembling the small ice skating rink in the yard below us: pulling up the stakes, knocking the side boards apart, rolling up the plastic sheet that held the water in. No more skating this season.

We walked over to the supermarket and I heard two Common Grackles, the first I have heard this year. Their harsh cries sounded musical to my ears: spring is coming, spring is here.

And I feel a faint tickle in the back of my throat, a little shortness of breath after I’d been walking for two hours to Central Square and back: tree pollen is out, and hay fever season has fairly begun.

Ice out

Carol and I walked around Fresh Pond in Cambridge this afternoon. It must have been 70 degrees; sunny, too.

The ice is off about half of Fresh Pond. A stiff breeze was blowing across the pond, and on the windward side, you could hear the ice crunching along the edge of the pond. We watched it for a while: the wind pushed the ice sheet against the shore, pushing it up onto land, little pieces of ice breaking off.

Already I’ve noticed there are many fewer ducks and loons on New Bedford harbor than a month ago, for the waterfowl are beginning to move back inland. No waterfowl yet on Fresh Pond, but soon they will move off their wintering grounds along the coast and stop here on their way to their breeding grounds.

November morning

You know when you’re driving into southeastern Massachusetts because the land flattens out as you move into the south coastal plain. The Wisconsinan glaciation ground off any protrusions from the underlying metamorphic bedrock, and when it retreated, the land it left behind always appears to me quite a bit flatter than the landscape further north and west.

You see a different mix of trees along the highway, too. This morning as I drove down to New Bedford from Watertown, once I got fairly into the coastal plain, I noticed many more red oaks along the side of the road. They stand out at this time of the year because they are still holding onto their leaves; and the red oak leaves are a particularly brilliant shade of red this year; in some of the trees I could see almost none of the usual brownish tinge to the leaves. The leaves glowed cranberry red in the early morning sun.

I saw just one or two trucks parked along the highway this morning, compared to the half a dozen two weeks ago. Maybe it was because I was driving down a little later in the morning, or maybe it’s because the most of the hunters have bagged their season limit of pheasant and quail and grouse.

You pass the sign that says, “Entering the Buzzard’s Bay watershed: Communities connected by water,” and it’s pretty much all downhill, literally, from there. The traffic is significantly lighter by that point. Even at eight in the morning, there’s plenty of traffic along interstate 93 heading south out of Boston. But by the time I got onto state route 24, around nine o’clock, there were times when I could only see one other car on the highway.

I pulled into downtown New Bedford at quarter past nine. Downtown is pretty empty on weekends at this time of year; the malls along route 6 in north Dartmouth have sucked most of the retail traffic away from here. I got a parking place right in front of the door to our apartment. Later, I walked up to the pharmacy two blocks up the hill. The trees along William Street are sheltered, and still have a few green leaves. I saw a few people. I passed one a man who looked somewhat the worse for wear; he was softly talking to himself, let out a loud belch, chuckled to himself in satisfaction. The other people I passed were just quietly going about their morning errands, headed to the newstand or the pharmacy or Cafe Arpeggio, hunched into their coats against the cold, the coldest morning yet this fall. I took care of my errand at the pharmacy, and headed back home to make a pot of hot tea.