This is The City. My The City.

[rushthatspeaks]

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.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Can I metaquotes?

[rushthatspeaks]

Sure.

[kore]

This is lovely.

[aedifica]

This is extra neat to read as a new resident! I like Somerville and Cambridge and Boston very much, but they're only acquaintances so far, not close friends yet.

[jjhunter]

Oh my heart yes, that is my city. :o)

Here via metaquotes

[cleo]

This is so lovely! I lived in Boston for two years and loved it. But I moved to Somerville (Winter Hill) this summer, and it's now that I really find myself having those moments about Boston/Cambridge/Somerville, that this place is the place for me.

[wayman]

every single person in the world is always in the Market Basket, every one... and the only way not to have your toes run over is, literally, to be an elderly nun. ... I need to get back to my old habit

I'll assume this was the article of clothing it ought to have been easy to locate!

[twtd]

This is lovely and makes me miss living in Boston. And I think I know of the bar in Union Square. I used to have a huge crush on one of the bartenders when she was working at her last trendy, speakeasyish place. And there's another lovely unmarked bar in Central. It's says something about me that I know Boston by its speakeasys, I'm just not sure I want to know what.

[kate_nepveu]

I am very glad that you're back.

[goodbyebird]

This was a very lovely read.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

This city loves you.

Nine

[sovay]

I love this city, I love this city, oh how very much I love this city.

I love you. I am glad this is your city.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

If I were your city I would tie a ribbon round this letter and keep it forever.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I may have mentioned this already, but one can buy shoes in camping shops. My life has been much better since I discovered this, because while I still hate buying shoes, at least I don't have to go into any shoe shops.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My mother does not understand how I can go buy my boots with no fuss but when faced with a choice of black dress shoes, my mind revolts and I flee in disgust. This is part of why. At REI, nobody dithers at me about what I will wear them with and whether the stitching is what I want and like that. They ask what I will wear them for, and then we get the ones in that category that fit me best, period, whether they are grey or black or brown or tan or have bright green bits.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

This. 100%

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I know just a bit of that part of the city from recent short visits, and each time I keep thinking, I could live here and love it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I know several people who seem to feel that it is some kind of great virtue to be able to state that they could happily live anywhere. The one who is loudest about this in my immediate vicinity is a person who has never lived outside the Midwest, ever, not by even the narrowest definition of the Midwest. But she feels that it is some kind of virtue to imagine--out loud, in the faces of people who are moving to make themselves at home again--that she would be happy just anywhere really, it doesn't matter to her.

Well, there is also virtue in loving the particular, in knowing the place where your heart lives and recognizing all its warts and loving it still. The way it works for us means that we will never be neighbors. But I do understand, oh yes.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Perhaps she simply assumes everywhere in the world is like the Midwest?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That is almost certainly the case. She has visited other places (mostly in the US), but I think she really, really doesn't get that there can be differences that are more than cosmetic that don't necessarily show up on a weekend's visit, ranging all over how you actually live your life.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Well, there is also virtue in loving the particular, in knowing the place where your heart lives and recognizing all its warts and loving it still.

Oh yes.

It surprised me, really, the first time I moved to a place and found I didn't want to leave. I always pictured myself as a restless traveler, not someone who would choose a place as a place of my heart. But there's a lot to be said for doing so.

[redbird]

This puzzles me. Not just in the specific, of your acquaintance who is sure she could live anywhere without having tried Hong Kong or a village in Kenya or even Seattle or Dallas, but more generally. It might be useful to be able to live anywhere (for some value of "anywhere") but what does that have to do with virtue? At best, it's like my being glad I have few food sensitivities, because having more would complicate things. "All places are alike to me" seems as odd a boast as "I don't care who I sleep with" would be. (Either might be true of some people, but not all true statements describe virtues.)

[landofnowhere]

<3

I was born there (though my parents moved away before I turned 3) and went to college there, and every time I come back I feel more alive.

[ckd]

I don't get the same sort of "this is home" feeling about 617 that one might expect from having lived here as long as I have. I think part of that is being an Army brat; the two things that make a place feel like home are the presence of my family and the presence of a military installation, and neither of those apply here. (Hanscom AFB is too small and too far from town.)

That said, I still love it for what it is and what it can be and what it puts up with. I love NYC, as a place to visit; I don't know if I could live there. I can live here.

(One thing I truly love about this place is that it attracts amazing neat people who I don't see nearly as often as I'd like to. We should fix that last bit. :-)

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

I only lived in the area the year I was at MIT, now over a quarter-century ago. (I do come up to Boston a few times a year for family visits and conventions, but I seldom get to Cambridge anymore.) Good to see it's still got its charms. I wouldn't mind living there if it came to it, but Brooklyn is capital-H Home, and I love it as fiercely as you love where you are. (Enjoy NYC while you're here!)

[veejane.livejournal.com]

What is funniest about this love-letter to Our City is that the love-letter I would write would be about completely different things in the same city.

(Mostly mine would be about how you can still find flyers that say, "T Stop: Auditorium," which is two names ago for that particular T stop, and not within my living memory, but when someone from away mentioned it to me in frustration, because who does that, seriously, even the T itself has stopped calling it that, I just automatically knew which stop was meant.)

(It would also be about car-navigation stories, which are interesting only to people who drive, and people who are not horrified by Boston driving, which is to say, a very small number of people.)

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

<3 @ the title of this post.

<3 @ this post.

<3 @ the city.

<3 @ you.

[tilivenn.livejournal.com]

This is reminding me that I need to start mentally writing the second part of my personal love story with this city (metropolitan area, really). There were a couple of weeks when I came to my senses and realized that, no really, it was love, in my senior year of high school. That's been the "when I fell for Boston" narrative for me for a while. But, huh, it turns out that was actually two and a half years ago, and surely there have been other important points in our relationship since then.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

It is so good to have a city that is Your City. I am getting that way with DC, although it will of course take many years to know it as well as you know Boston. But I feel like I do want to get to know it that well, which I haven't felt about any place before other than the Pioneer Valley.

[rosefox]

This is me with NYC, precisely.

I'm so glad you and your city get to be together again.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

You have described perfectly the Boston that I come home to again and again, despite the fact that I live in NYC.

Thank you!

[marchharetay.livejournal.com]

I love your city too. It was part by accident that my relationship wound up being with NYC instead (which I dearly love), but your city always has the life I might have had place in my heart.

Also, I should really come visit in the next year. I used to get there annually...