This is The City. My The City.

I am presently sitting in New York, with family, thinking about how much I love Boston and Cambridge and Somerville. Seriously, I don't think there's been a day since we moved back that I haven't thought about that.

It might be that familiarity breeds content, but it's not as though we moved back into our old neighborhood entirely, and I am blazingly fond of our new one. Some of it's definitely familiarity, that when I want to buy an odd spice or a particular sweatshirt or a specific issue of comic book I have a list of places to try triaged by hours open, nearness in neighborhood, and probable price; that literally every single time I walk into the coffeeshop I think of as my office I see somebody I know and it isn't always the same people either; that when I go to the hot-tub place I chat with the guy behind the counter about his other job at the ice-cream shop, because I know him from seeing him do both things. I know the alleys in Harvard Square, although not as well as nineweaving does, and some of them are tiny and surprising; I remember where to stand on Easter morning to watch the zombie march lurch by. The Chinese restaurant we got married in feels slighted if we haven't gone there in too long, but I think they forgave us for leaving, since we came back. So part familiarity.

But part of it's definitely that the city's there when I want it. I have two coffeeshops now, my office and the one I go to on my way down the block, and the second one runs me a tab, which bowls me over because I did not think people did that anymore and they set it up, I did not ask them. The branch of the library down the block turns out to be where they keep the colonial manuscripts collection, so I am working on my acquaintanceship with Cotton Mather's witch-books. The Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle keep collaborating to throw amazing programming at me (I went to seventeen films in theatres in the month of September). The place without a sign next to my second coffeeshop turns out to be an industrial arts collective who are trying to see how far they can extend a solar-powered free wi-fi zone from the center of their shop floor, and who are also doing something unidentifiable with very large machinery and hanging bicycles from a treetrunk. I missed the Marshmallow Fluff festival because I went to the state fair instead, but there is, apparently, such a thing as a Marshmallow Fluff festival.

Part of it, though, is that the city also backs off sometimes. It does not overload. You have to poke around to find what you want, and if you sit on a park bench people politely ignore you, as was the way where I grew up. It's not rude to talk to people, but it isn't rude not to.

And there's always more there there. The more I dig the more awesome I find it. The hundreds-of-varieties-of-honey store, and the other industrial arts collective, with the laser cutter, and the mural in an alley in Central Square which I'm pretty sure is a Shepard Fairey but I cannot prove it, and the way that all the music shops I know of sell vinyl, and the brick-inlaid labyrinth in the community garden, and the absolute silence in the monastery garden which is two blocks from Harvard how do they get it that quiet, and the rainbow flag with a pink stripe which hangs from a house I walk by often, and what does the pink stripe mean anyway. The way every single person in the world is always in the Market Basket, every one, maybe you all have amnesia but you are actually there right now if you are reading this during their opening hours, because it is just that full and the only way not to have your toes run over is, literally, to be an elderly nun. The knit-bombing which seems to be proceeding around the area parks, so that every few days there's another set of color-coordinated swingset cozies going on out the bus window. The way you can now detect the unmarked, carefully speakeasy-ish bar in Davis Square by the long line of trendy Tufts students standing outside it, but you'll never find the one in Union using that method.

It is a perfect city for an academic introvert and I need to get back to my old habit, before we moved away, of just leaving the house and making turns at random, whenever I felt like it, walking for hours and hours and hours. Two pm and suddenly in Mount Auburn cemetery, when I thought I remembered crossing the river; three am and you can hear a pin drop in Harvard Square, nobody out except the runaway rescue, all of whom are lovely people.

I love it even when it's having an off day, or being intentionally off-putting, and it staggers me how much sometimes. I mean there was this day, a while back, when I was out with sovay, and we were looking for an article of clothing it ought to have been easy to locate, a very simple thing; and we went to the Goodwill and the Garment District and the other Goodwill and the AIDS Awareness Thrift and poked our head into a couple of the places which give you sticker shock and none of them had this garment; and we had sore feet and a time limit both for when the garment was necessary and for when I had to go away and go to dinner; and we had the requisite encounters with a person with unusual public boundaries in the other Goodwill and with a clerk who did not find us very trendy in the Garment District; and it was coming on to rain, very hard and cold and sudden. And we were sitting on a bench in Central and my shoe-strap had just given up the ghost and the drops were starting, and the gentleman behind us was discussing, in tones appropriate for football cheering, the care and maintenance of his methadone addiction and the various gruesome things it had done to his body. Just then I spotted a bus, with the thrill of a wild-bird watcher: the bus that is supposed to go from my neighborhood to Central, which I had never before managed to see in the wild, let alone use, because it has no relationship of any kind to its schedule, ever, and of course I had no reason to be taking it, because I was not going back to my neighborhood for dinner, and I fully expect that I shall never see it again. And my other shoe-strap was starting to give way, and I hate shoe-shopping more than anything else in the universe, and all I could think of, the only thought in my head in that moment, was I love this city, I love this city, oh how very much I love this city.

That's my Boston. I did miss it.

This is The City. My The City.

I am presently sitting in New York, with family, thinking about how much I love Boston and Cambridge and Somerville. Seriously, I don't think there's been a day since we moved back that I haven't thought about that.

It might be that familiarity breeds content, but it's not as though we moved back into our old neighborhood entirely, and I am blazingly fond of our new one. Some of it's definitely familiarity, that when I want to buy an odd spice or a particular sweatshirt or a specific issue of comic book I have a list of places to try triaged by hours open, nearness in neighborhood, and probable price; that literally every single time I walk into the coffeeshop I think of as my office I see somebody I know and it isn't always the same people either; that when I go to the hot-tub place I chat with the guy behind the counter about his other job at the ice-cream shop, because I know him from seeing him do both things. I know the alleys in Harvard Square, although not as well as nineweaving does, and some of them are tiny and surprising; I remember where to stand on Easter morning to watch the zombie march lurch by. The Chinese restaurant we got married in feels slighted if we haven't gone there in too long, but I think they forgave us for leaving, since we came back. So part familiarity.

But part of it's definitely that the city's there when I want it. I have two coffeeshops now, my office and the one I go to on my way down the block, and the second one runs me a tab, which bowls me over because I did not think people did that anymore and they set it up, I did not ask them. The branch of the library down the block turns out to be where they keep the colonial manuscripts collection, so I am working on my acquaintanceship with Cotton Mather's witch-books. The Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle keep collaborating to throw amazing programming at me (I went to seventeen films in theatres in the month of September). The place without a sign next to my second coffeeshop turns out to be an industrial arts collective who are trying to see how far they can extend a solar-powered free wi-fi zone from the center of their shop floor, and who are also doing something unidentifiable with very large machinery and hanging bicycles from a treetrunk. I missed the Marshmallow Fluff festival because I went to the state fair instead, but there is, apparently, such a thing as a Marshmallow Fluff festival.

Part of it, though, is that the city also backs off sometimes. It does not overload. You have to poke around to find what you want, and if you sit on a park bench people politely ignore you, as was the way where I grew up. It's not rude to talk to people, but it isn't rude not to.

And there's always more there there. The more I dig the more awesome I find it. The hundreds-of-varieties-of-honey store, and the other industrial arts collective, with the laser cutter, and the mural in an alley in Central Square which I'm pretty sure is a Shepard Fairey but I cannot prove it, and the way that all the music shops I know of sell vinyl, and the brick-inlaid labyrinth in the community garden, and the absolute silence in the monastery garden which is two blocks from Harvard how do they get it that quiet, and the rainbow flag with a pink stripe which hangs from a house I walk by often, and what does the pink stripe mean anyway. The way every single person in the world is always in the Market Basket, every one, maybe you all have amnesia but you are actually there right now if you are reading this during their opening hours, because it is just that full and the only way not to have your toes run over is, literally, to be an elderly nun. The knit-bombing which seems to be proceeding around the area parks, so that every few days there's another set of color-coordinated swingset cozies going on out the bus window. The way you can now detect the unmarked, carefully speakeasy-ish bar in Davis Square by the long line of trendy Tufts students standing outside it, but you'll never find the one in Union using that method.

It is a perfect city for an academic introvert and I need to get back to my old habit, before we moved away, of just leaving the house and making turns at random, whenever I felt like it, walking for hours and hours and hours. Two pm and suddenly in Mount Auburn cemetery, when I thought I remembered crossing the river; three am and you can hear a pin drop in Harvard Square, nobody out except the runaway rescue, all of whom are lovely people.

I love it even when it's having an off day, or being intentionally off-putting, and it staggers me how much sometimes. I mean there was this day, a while back, when I was out with sovay, and we were looking for an article of clothing it ought to have been easy to locate, a very simple thing; and we went to the Goodwill and the Garment District and the other Goodwill and the AIDS Awareness Thrift and poked our head into a couple of the places which give you sticker shock and none of them had this garment; and we had sore feet and a time limit both for when the garment was necessary and for when I had to go away and go to dinner; and we had the requisite encounters with a person with unusual public boundaries in the other Goodwill and with a clerk who did not find us very trendy in the Garment District; and it was coming on to rain, very hard and cold and sudden. And we were sitting on a bench in Central and my shoe-strap had just given up the ghost and the drops were starting, and the gentleman behind us was discussing, in tones appropriate for football cheering, the care and maintenance of his methadone addiction and the various gruesome things it had done to his body. Just then I spotted a bus, with the thrill of a wild-bird watcher: the bus that is supposed to go from my neighborhood to Central, which I had never before managed to see in the wild, let alone use, because it has no relationship of any kind to its schedule, ever, and of course I had no reason to be taking it, because I was not going back to my neighborhood for dinner, and I fully expect that I shall never see it again. And my other shoe-strap was starting to give way, and I hate shoe-shopping more than anything else in the universe, and all I could think of, the only thought in my head in that moment, was I love this city, I love this city, oh how very much I love this city.

That's my Boston. I did miss it.

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