Long Distance

Recently while we were in Boston staying with our daughter for a couple of days, we decided to walk to Harvard Square for breakfast.  It took over an hour.  It was a really hot day.  The city was especially noisy and I was not in a great mood.  I was really hungry.  I can't even remember why now, but for some reason we had skipped dinner the night before. Now we were way past my breakfast time and I was ravenous.  I had been taking photographs the entire vacation, but this morning I was sleepy, in my head and not thinking about art.  Just breakfast, dammit. My daughter and husband walked in front of me for a long while, chatting, laughing, having fun.  They apparently don't need dinner and breakfast to be civil, or to hold a conversation.  It took me a long time before I got present. 

But, at some point, I remembered how.  And that I should.  So, I looked up into the present world around me.  And let it go.  I got out of my head and I began to see again.

We crossed the bridge, walked by the Charles River, past M.I.T. and trudged up Mass. Ave. on and on.  Eventually we were in all those neighborhood Squares, one after the other, before we got to Cambridge and entered Harvard Square.  This walk was actually the first time I even understood the word “Square” after Harvard and realized it was parallel to saying Central Square and Inman Square!  When I grew up, it was just that place I hung out, down the street from my high school called harvard square. 

Along the way beside us all the cars were in traffic, and at endless stoplights, block after block. Buses were dropping off and picking up on every corner, delivery trucks were double parked and always in the way, and people were rushing.  Everyone was everywhere. But everyone seemed so much younger now.  Had this always been just a college area and I never even noticed?  It seemed to now go from being a neighborhood of MIT directly into one of Harvard.  My heart remembered older people everywhere.  Once upon a time there were corner bars, local coffee shops, and old fashioned drugstores and older people were in them.  My grandparents ran errands here, and my dad worked up the street. Everything now teetered on trendy.  Because I was so quiet, I began to see the layers of it all.  The past I once knew was now lacquered with the present.  I was struck with how connected I once was to that area and how much I was remembering as a result, and how much had changed.  Each Square triggered a family story for me, as well as my husband, and our daughter listened patiently.  My senses were on overload but I was finally enjoying the trip of it all.  It was pretty wonderful to be back.

I began to slow down on purpose.  ‘It wasn’t actually that hot,’ I decided and ‘surely I’ll eat soon.’  How alive everything around me in this moment was, and how wonderful we were able to take this family walk together - in

our daughter's city. 

It was then I glanced to my left and saw an old, abandoned pay phone.   I couldn't even remember the last time I used a pay phone or saw one on a street. They seemed to just disappear one day.  One by one.  This disconnected pay phone was stuck uselessly now between a garage and a building along the sidewalk on which we were walking.  I bet no one had even looked at it in ten years. It was like a sci-fi movie where the director places a few historical relics to help us grasp the concept of past and future perfect colliding.  I walked over to the alien phone, and took in the graffiti.  From far away it looked like something or someone had burned it, but up close it was all just meaningfully tagged.  It was then I noticed that the receiver was gently placed on its side on the silver, metal shelf below - sleeping.  It was like someone had left for just a minute to go get a pen, or find more quarters for the call - twenty years ago, and never returned.  Or they got sucked up in the vortex where all those other pay phones now live.  My mind started thinking about that last call on this phone, and who made it.  Who received it? Where are they now?  I then stepped back to place it all in the here and now.  That’s when I saw the sticker someone had placed on the bottom: "OH, the Humanity of it All."  Perfect. 

I used my cell phone and took a shot.  That metaphor of was not lost on me.