Heard while eating lunch today in New Bedford: “I never go to Boston. It’s too far. It’s like going to a foreign country.”

Got in my car just after two, drove to Concord to see Nancy James, the insurance agent I used to use when I lived in Massachusetts before. This past Sunday, she was at the big celebration at the Gloucester Universalist church, the first Universalist church in New England (according to some historians). Nancy’s ancestors were among the people who signed the original charter. So if you want to play the “I-was-born-a-Unitarian-Universalist” game, just remember that it’s almost impossible to beat Nancy.

After spending a year in the midwest, I’m used to driving an hour or more to go shopping. As long as I was in Concord, I slipped over to Maynard, to the Maynard Outdoor Store. I’ve been going there since I was a kid, and some of the same people are still working there. As usual, they had everything I wanted, and cheaper than you can get things through mail order. Still family-owned, too. (Someday I’ll do profiles of “real stores” on this blog….)

Met Carol in Cambridge, where she stays during the week for her job. We had sushi at Whole Foods Market in Cambridge. Great people-watching — from classic nutty-crunchy aging Cambridge hippies, to Muslim women in veils, to tanned-and-fit yupsters, to students — and the cutest little baby sitting at the next booth while we were eating, whose parents apparently were speaking some East Asian language.

Driving back, listened to WUMB, the folk radio station in Boston (which has a repeater in Falmouth, at 91.9 FM, so we also listen to it in New Bedford). It was dark and late, and I was in one of those meditative states you get into sometimes when you drive, and the announcer said, “Neil Young has a new record out, blah blah blah,” and Neil Young’s quavery, slightly out-of-tune voice came on the air. Wait, isn’t Neil Young dead or something? You mean he’s still singing, and sounds exactly the way he did in the 70’s when I used to sit in front of Dad’s big stereo set listening to Captain Ken Shelton play Neil Young every Thursday on the Top 40 Countdown? Either that, or I’m suffering from some kind of hellish flashback to the miserable 1970’s. I turned the radio off.

Stopped at the Bridgewater service station off Rt. 24 to top off my tank. As I pulled in to the gas pumps, I noticed an attractive middle-aged woman pumping gas into her Ford Explorer right in front of me. I took my time getting out of the car, fiddled with my credit card, eventually started pumping gas into my little ’93 Toyota Corolla. She finished filling her tank just after I finished filling mine — I hate to think how much gas she had to put in her SUV, or how much she paid at $2.87 a gallon. And hey, I sympathize with her, I’m feeling it at the pump too. My poor little Toyota used to get forty miles per gallon on road trips, but with age now it’s down to thirty-five miles per gallon.