Boston

Last Wednesday, I flew to Boston for a conference that was being held at Harvard. It was a joint presentation of the National Association of Independent Schools and Harvard's Graduate School of Education. It is rather expensive - conference, hotel, flight -so FWC, so far, has sent one person a year for the last three years. It was my year. So, with the help of some meds, I enjoyed the flight immensely. In fact, I slept and remember very little of it.

The conference started on Thursday, but I arrived Wednesday, at noon, by design. With a little bit of time, I could stop by some sights that I wanted to see or revisit.

I wished I had taken my computer with me so that this would be easier, but I didn't so I am writing in hindsight since I arrived back home last night close to midnight, more drugs and more sleep.

Places I Went/Saw:

Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I had heard it was pretty and it was just an hours drive north. Got there and will go back. In fact, L and I are planning a trip to this area in March to celebrate our 20th anniversary. We went to Vermont on our honeymoon.

I saw a bridge in Portsmouth. I crossed it and a sign tells me that I am entering Maine. That is a highlight because I had never been to ME. I drove through town, Kittery(?), and decided to visit Maine means that I must do something other than drive across a bridge and meander through a city. So, I stopped at Chef's Cove Cafe and ate a sandwich, some chips, and a Diet Coke.

Exeter, New Hampshire. After leaving ME, I drove west through New Hampshire to Exeter. A town known, if it is known, by Philips Exeter School. They themselves, and many others, consider them to be the elitist of the elite independent, private, boarding high schools. Nice campus, like a college.

Then. Then. Then, to Derry, New Hampshire. This was a great treat for me. Derry, NH, is where Robert Frost spent several years farming, writing poetry - some of the best known of his, and teaching at Pinkerton Academy. His house is there and while it and the barn were closed that didn't keep me from parking and walking through the farm. There were trails leading through the woods and next to a stream that I believe was partly the basis for the poem "Hyla Brook." There was a perfect rock wall circling a meadow in the farm, a wall that he partly built. There was a marker for a tree that he referred to a couple of times because he looked out a window in his home and could see it.

Concord, NH. This is where I spent the night after finding a hotel and going into town to eat at Helen's. Another sandwich. Best Western was the hotel. I found it in the rain after getting lost in the blackness of country roads that were made darker by the trees hanging over the asphalt. The next morning I visited the Old North Bridge, where "the shot heard round the world" was fired. "Old Manse" which was a house built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's parents, lived in by RWE and Henry David Thoreau at different times and then given to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his new bride along with a garden planted by Thoreau as a wedding gift, is right next to the bridge and part of the Minuteman National Historical Park and maintained by the National Park Service. Then, I stopped by Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the cemetery mentioned in the "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving. There on "author's ridge", Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women, are buried.

Walden Pond. Another treat. Walden is where H.D.Thoreau spent several years in a small cabin that he built himself. Though the cabin isn't there, an exact replica is. They can build an exact replica because he was exact in his description in "Walden Pond". The pond is there with the location of his house near a small sandbar that was there when he lived, and is still there. It was very rainy here so I will have to go back when I can spend a little more time.

I walked the Freedom Trail on the last day. There are 15, 16 or so sites on this 2.5 walking trail through the Boston. Boston Massacre sight, Old North Church, couple of cemeteries, churches, Paul Revere's home, Boston Commons, other places.

Rode the subway into Boston a couple of times. Got wonderfully lost. Started to take the subway to the Boston College/Notre Dame game but decided on a bookstore instead. Oh, in Cambridge, where Harvard is, there are many bookstores. Stores for popular books, just poetry, just banned books, just almost banned books. just used books or "experienced" books as they would say. I came back with a lot of books.

Had a Cambridge police officer pull up next to me. We rolled our windows down in unison. He says, "Whad is tha matta wid ya? Do ya know how to use ya directionals?" At this, I had a slight moment of panic because I thought I was going to have to have him repeat himself and he looked the type to make a southerner just sort of disappear into the Charles River. I didn't get the "directionals" part. But, then I thought of the blinkers and apologized. He sped off.

Fenway Park close up (when I was lost) and Gillette Stadium from far away when I was walking on a cobble stone street near Revere's house.

Harvard and M.I.T. Saw them both but will write about that tomorrow.

One disappointment. The Globe Corner Bookstore was, and is, a stop on the Freedom Trail. It was a gathering place of sort during the revolution. When Leslie and I flew here on our way to Vermont twenty years ago, we walked the trail, stopped into the store, made a purchase, a couple of small books that I still have. I hoped to do the same thing. I almost missed it this time but then sadly realized that the building was right, I was looking at it, and the historical marker was there, but now it was a gaudy jewelry store. I don't get that. Another example from the trail. The first City Hall for Boston is a pretty building. On the trail it sits next to the sight of the first public school in America, the school is simply a marker. The City Hall building, though, an old building, historical, stately, now has a Ruths(sp) Chris Steakhouse in the lower level. I don't get that either.