Eighteen years ago, in one of my more sentimental moments, I blogged this:

This is what it's like to grow old.

I've lived my life thinking: while I'm young, I'll live it up. That way I'll have a huge collection of wonderful memories to relive when I get old, and can't do all those fun things anymore.

I guess I'm over the crest of that proverbial hill, because when I look back, I'm filled with hundreds upon hundreds of memories of my life.

I see now why old people feel isolated. It's not because they're alone; it's because they've lived an amazing, deeply touching novel that no one else will ever read.

So many people and places and events have touched my life, but no person will ever share the things I remember, the things that even today bring up deep feelings that toss me around like a toy boat toy boat toy boat.

Nearly two decades of life experience later, that image – of one’s life being a rich and meaningful story that no one else can ever fully appreciate – remains a powerful truth. That’s doubly so because most of our lives only persist within our own memories, locked within a single mind with no effective way to share them.

Don't Look Yet!

Don't Look Yet!

But all is not entirely lost. For many of us there are, in fact, a few precious, long-buried and boxed-up artifacts from those distant times. Fragments of the past that can be seen and touched, perhaps even photographed and shared.

So partly to share them with those of you who care, and partly just to honor the sacred memories of my life, today I begin what will probably be a long and ongoing new project: digging up and posting about some of the more interesting memorabilia that I’ve collected over six decades of living, laughing, loving, and adventuring.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey back through the times of my life. Maybe some of you will even see an item you recognize from our shared past. That would be delightful!

My plan is to share one item at a time, posting regularly, maybe once or twice a week. Photos will be accompanied by a brief writeup. Everything will be tagged “memorabilia”, and I’ve added a link to that growing collection of posts in my blog’s sidebar.

But the journey has already begun, in some sense. There are a handful of artifacts that I’ve already highlighted in past blogposts. So along with this introduction, I’ll begin by linking to those.

In vaguely descending order of their age, here are:

I’ll leave you with those for now, but you can look forward to lots more, as I begin this new series of postings. I’m certain I’ll enjoy it, and I hope you do, as well.

Today, kids grow up with their entire lives digitized and at their fingertips, but those of us over sixty rarely get a high-fidelity look back into our childhoods.

Sure, there might be some faded Polaroids or 35mm slides from major holidays, but those aren’t particularly vivid or easily shared. A majority of our lives—who we were and everything we experienced—exists only in brief flickers of increasingly fragile human memory, ultimately unsharable except as tediously repetitive verbal anecdotes, like those our grandparents told us when we were kids.

So when one uncovers an item that triggers lots of childhood memories and emotions, it’s worth expending some effort to preserve it. In this case, a 40-year-old cassette tape bearing a very special song, which I recently digitized.

Therindel and Daeron cover

Therindel and Daeron cover

Therindel and Daeron On Ravenhill cassette

Therindel and Daeron On Ravenhill cassette

In 1978 I was only fourteen years old and about to start high school. I’d recently devoured J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and had gotten in touch with a handful of other young fans to found the New England Tolkien Society.

NETS had two publications: I produced a big annual called “MAZAR BALINŪ” (The Book of Balin) that featured art, poetry, fiction, and such (read more about that here); but our regular newsletter was a monthly called “Ravenhill”, named after a fortified spur of the Dwarves’ Lonely Mountain, which was the ultimate goal of Bilbo & Co.’s quest in The Hobbit.

Our Tolkien fan group’s meetings were infrequent, because we were spread out all over the northeast, but we made up for it with enthusiasm, taking on Hobbit or Elven or Dwarven personae, dressing up in costumes, having period feasts, hosting Tolkien trivia contests, and the all-important mushroom-rolling race (using only one’s nose, of course).

Those events were always uproarious fun. Contrary to my home life as a very strong introvert, under my Hobbit persona I surprisingly found myself loosening up and expressing a fun-loving, impulsive side at our gatherings. For me, they were incredibly important experiments in my adolescent social and emotional growth.

It was in that context where, at one of our very earliest meetings, we were joined by a local musician named Tom Osborne, who went by the name “Dæron”, after a minstrel mentioned in Tolkien’s works. He played guitar and sang a folk song he’d composed around a poem written by Marthe Benedict (aka Therindel), a Tolkien fan of international renown.

The song, “On Ravenhill: Gimli’s Song of Parting”, is a poignant one. You may or may not recall that Gimli was the Dwarf who joined the Fellowship of the Ring to help Frodo bring the One Ring to Mordor. Tom’s song takes place long after the conclusion of the War of the Ring, as Gimli says farewell to the Lonely Mountain and Middle-earth, before joining his Elvish friend Legolas in sailing to the Undying Lands: something no Dwarf had ever been permitted to do.

Between the stirring words, so wonderfully performed, and the direct connection to our newsletter “Ravenhill”, everyone who heard it at that early gathering was near tears, despite the fact that we were mostly teenaged boys. There was something about Tolkien’s works that had touched each of us—the sense of wonder, the magnificence of nature, the freshness of youth, the sentimentality and romanticism—and Tom’s music and Therindel’s words captured all of that perfectly. It’s no exaggeration to say it resonated in my heart and lodged itself permanently in my memory.

The version I have on cassette… Over the past 42 years I never played it very often, but—knowing that it was important to me—I hung onto it through my many moves and all the changing roles and circumstances of my life. I’m happy that after so many years, it’s still in adequate condition for digitizing and posting (here’s the MP3), even if the quality isn’t up to modern standards.

Now, like Gimli, in old age I find myself looking back upon an astonishingly diverse, full, and fulfilling life with immense appreciation. I’m not quite ready to depart for the Undying Lands, but I can look back at the many treasures I have found, and savor precious memories such as those evoked by this deeply meaningful song of parting.

Far down the Lonely Mountain’s southern arm
I stand on the grey rocky height
Whence oft of old was sounded the alarm
And winged messengers soared in urgent flight.

(BEGIN CHORUS)
Only on Ravenhill—can you believe it still?
Looking across the green lands;
Mining the metals we shaped with our hands each day
Under the mountain where mystery lay.
(END CHORUS)

Here sun and wind and rain shaped the stone;
Here blood of kinsmen slain have soaked the clay;
And here I stand bent by the years I’ve known
To hear the echoes of a fading yesterday.

CHORUS

I am a living part of all this land—
Each standing stone, each tree a treasured friend,
Each glint of the sun a gem within my hand—
And yet beneath the sun all things must have an end.

CHORUS

I will surrender all I held as worth
And take the westward road across the sea.
A Dwarf of Durin’s race, a son of the earth,
Who dared to crave the lofty Elvish destiny.

CHORUS

So here I forfeit all my mortal right,
And here I render up my earthly will.
I shall leave it all to seek the light,
For I have bid the past farewell.

CHORUS x3

Every so often, curiosity impels me to check out my former homes on Google Streetview, to see how much they’ve changed over time. Usually it’s nothing dramatic, but today’s exception left me stunned, shocked, and incredibly grateful.

Back in 2001, I bought my first – and to date only – property, a condo unit on the second floor of the historic former Hotel Vendome, located in Boston’s trendy Back Bay.

By far its most dramatic feature – and the reason I selected it after viewing seventy others – was a sweeping view of the neighborhood. The living room’s south-facing bay windows not only offered tons of delightful sunshine, but overlooked an empty lot that had served as a parking lot since 1958. It was the only unit I’d seen that had such a wide-open vista.

That panorama included many of Boston’s notable buildings: the Hancock tower, the Prudential tower, the New Old South Church with its distinctive Italianate campanile, 500 Boylston, 222 Berkeley, the Boston Art Club and the 1884 headquarters of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club (both now part of the Snowden School). I could watch shoppers walking along trendy Newbury Street, catch glimpses of Boston Marathon participants as they finished in Copley Square, or admire the colorful DuBarry trompe d’oeil mural that decorated the exterior of one of the buildings facing the parking lot.

It was truly a fabulous view, and I enjoyed it virtually every single day for the fifteen years that I lived there. Here’s what it looked like around the time I moved in (as always, click through for a larger version):

Back Bay view in summer

Of course, there were also days when it looked a little more like this:

Back Bay view in winter

It was no secret to me how great a blessing it was that no one had built anything on that lot. In fact, it was kind of a mystery why it never happened. Although I never heard rumor of any plans, it was something I always feared. But nothing ever materialized, and I moved out and sold the unit in February 2016.

So you can imagine my shock when I happened to check my old place out on StreetView. Here’s the closest equivalent to what you would see out my bay windows as of September 2022:

Back Bay view in 2022

Yeah. Wow.

The lot was purchased in 2019 by L3 Capital in Chicago, who filed a project review in 2020 with the Boston Planning and Development Agency for a five-story, 43,000 square foot building containing retail and office space. A building permit was issued a year later, and construction appears to have moved along rapidly.

So that accounts for my “stunned and shocked” reaction.

As for “gratitude”, that comes from having enjoyed that unsurpassed view for fifteen wonderful years, and for the blind luck of having sold when I did, just four years before this development project came to light, on land that had been a parking lot for the previous sixty years!

My Back Bay condo was a truly amazing place to live, and that panoramic view was a huge, irreplaceable part of it. But that treasured view is one that I truly can never again experience.

I’m not a packrat, but I have an eye for memorabilia, socking away strange little keepsakes that would otherwise land in a dumpster. Examples include circuit boards from the PDP-11 system I managed in college, and the brass corporate mission plaque from MediQual, my first post-college employer.

Another such item is a poster-sized oil painting that hung over Sapient’s front desk back in 1995, when I was first hired by the nascent internet consulting company.

Boston Painting

It was an original composition by Courtney, Sapient’s receptionist, who had recently graduated with a bachelors degree in studio art at Dartmouth College. Painted a year earlier, it depicts a streetscape of brownstones in Boston’s South End, where she lived.

During her years at Sapient, Courtney left the front desk and led new employee orientation, then ran Sapient’s People Strategy Organization (aka HR), and finally took overall responsibility for corporate culture. Over that time we had several moves and refreshes of our office space, and her painting was thrown into permanent storage and forgotten.

When the Dot-Com bubble burst, Sapient needed to shrink its physical footprint. Being a curious little opportunist, one day I accompanied our Operations team as they cleaned out one of the storage areas. Unearthing Courtney’s painting, and knowing that she was no longer around, I received permission to adopt it.

That was around 2002, toward the end of my tenure at Sapient, and just after my purchase of a condo in Boston’s Copley Square. When I brought the painting home, it took pride of place on the brick wall in my front entryway. And there it hung.

Years later, before I left Boston, I reached out to Courtney and offered to pay her or give the painting back. Despite initial interest, she never made arrangements to pick it up, and I never heard from her again.

The painting has been with me for nearly two decades, and now graces our Pittsburgh dining room. It is a treasured reminder of Boston, my time at Sapient, and the Back Bay condo I loved.

I renounced my citizenship in the State of Maine twenty-eight years ago, when I moved away after college. Locals will tell you I’m not a real Mainer anyways; I was still “from away”, having lived there only 24 of my first 25 years.

When I left, I was eager to leave the land of poverty, ignorance, and racism behind me and start a new, adult life in Boston. I did my best to sever all ties with the land of my youth; but there was always one obligation that kept pulling me back: my parents.

For more than two dozen years, I continued making regular trips north to visit. Going back to Maine was always uncomfortable for me, like perpetually picking at the scab covering the many reasons why I’d left; it never fully healed.

That obligation to keep returning came to an end in January, when my mother passed away. My only remaining duty was last week’s interment ceremony, and the brief family gathering in her memory.

So now I can turn my back and leave Augusta for what might well be the very last time, and say perhaps my final farewell to the State of Maine.

I suppose it’s a major life passage. I left three decades ago, but this is truly the final severance of my ties to Maine. It’s the cause for a little bit of melancholy, but a much larger sense of closure, relief, and joy.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t really hate Maine… I carry treasured memories of some of the people and places and experiences of my childhood. But that chapter ended thirty years ago, and there’s no point in lingering in the vicinity of long-past adventures.

It’s futile to cling to people and places that have already undergone three or four decades of change; what’s truly important are the memories I have of them, not the present reality. And unlike the present reality, I can carry those treasured memories with me, no matter where I go.

It’s also ironic that my trip home from Maine involved driving to Boston and flying out of Logan airport. You see, my mother’s death also removed my biggest reason for coming back to pass through Boston.

So this trip was a farewell to Boston, as well. Unlike Maine, Boston is a place I dearly love, where I feel at home, and have lots of recent history that I chose to create. So I’m hoping there will be reasons to visit that bring me back in the future; I just won’t have the convenient opportunity provided by flying in on the way up to Maine.

But even in Boston, a lot of what I loved here is history, and many of the people have moved on. I guess it’s one of those lessons that only comes when one has lived long enough: that clinging to people and places from the past is futile, and the part that matters most—your memories of them—can be taken with you, wherever you choose to live.

Even if you were never to return again.

It’s official: in six weeks TT the Bears will shutter and disappear, leaving Central Square that much more normal.

Right next door to the Middle East, TT’s booked bands that would have struggled in that larger venue. But that gave TT’s the freedom to feature all kinds of unknown but enjoyable acts.

Greg Hawkes

And the tiny size of the club made the concertgoing experience that much more intimate, whether you wanted it or not! You couldn’t physically get more than about 30 feet from the stage.

I can’t say I was a regular at TT’s, but I did see my share of shows. My buddy Bob Corsaro will be glad to know that I was there to see his ska band, the Brass Monkeys, play no less than four times. Multiple shows by Boston ska royalty the Allstonians and Beat Soup. Inspecter 7. Dow Jones & the Industrials.

One of the more memorable shows I enjoyed was Mono Puff, a bizarre alt-rock collage orchestrated by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants fame. As they might tell you themselves, “It was totally rockin’!”

But the most unforgettable moment was the night I met Greg Hawkes, the original keyboardist for the Cars. He was the only band member who showed up at a 2005 show celebrating the release of a Cars tribute album by a collection of Boston-based bands.

I was introduced to Mr. Hawkes by show organizer Andrea Kremer, and actually got to sit with him and chat before he took the stage as guest performer for “Just What I Needed”. It remains one of the most cherished memories of my time in the scene. You can read more about that show and see my other photos in my blogpost, “Life’s the same, except for my shoes…”

Now TT’s becomes another in a long list of legendary Boston music clubs that can only be spoken of in the past tense. But these memories remain.

When we love someone, we hold their story within our hearts. When they pass, it’s incumbent upon us to bring that story forth and hold it shining like a gemstone for all to see.

Thus, I have to tell Grady’s story.

Two years after my first cat passed away, I was ready to add a new member to my household. In September of 2007 I went to the MSPCA’s Angell Memorial shelter and met a little gray cat. When I petted him, he had a very loud, easy purr, and I decided that he was the one.

The tag on his cage said his name was “Grady”, which is strange, because the previous owner had written “Grey” on the info sheet when she surrendered him. Of course, the tag also said he was “about 3 years old”, when the owner had said “one year”.

Grady
Grady perched
Grady belly
Grady boxed
Grady's neighborhood
Grady leaps
Grady snuggling
Grady Schemes
Grady begging

I’d thought I was getting an adult cat, but he really wasn’t much more than a kitten, and he had the energy and temperament to match. In the early years, he would often full-on attack me, drawing blood mostly with his teeth. When I got an animal behaviorist in, she tried to play with him until he was exhausted, but after 90 minutes of that without pause, she declared him “99th percentile”.

It got to the point where I was almost convinced that I would have to get rid of him, but we persevered, and I found that putting him in isolation when he misbehaved finally got the message through. He even figured out that if he really needed to play, he could come up to me, sit up on his haunches, and beg with his hands together. And if I wasn’t paying attention, he could tap my elbow with his paw first.

Play for him meant jumping for bouncing ping pong balls or leaping for potholders tossed like frisbees. He even played with little toy cars, rolling them around on the hardwood floor! But his favorite toys were the rubber wristbands that used to be popular; he’d run and chase them, then chew them up until they were destroyed. If you threw his stuffed toy pheasant, he’d run after it at full tilt, grab it with his forepaws, and do a complete somersault before administering a killing bite and bunny-hop kicks.

As he matured, he mellowed and came to trust me completely. Of course, whenever I came home, I could expect him to trot up and meet me at the door. He’d come snuggle any time I was on the couch, or nestle in the crook of my arm as I sat up in bed reading. If I was working at my desk, he’d come drape himself over my shoulder. We even got to the point where I could reliably hold him in my arms and rub his belly.

He was a good leaper, jumping across the kitchen from the island counter to the top of the fridge. He’d also jump several feet up and grab onto “his” particular part of the brick wall separating the kitchen and living room, or atop his scratching post. Every time I was on the toilet, we’d have to play grab-tag in the gap beneath the bathroom door. With people and loud noises, he was absolutely fearless… He had only one mortal fear: tinfoil!

Another daily ritual was feeding time. He was fed twice a day by an automatic feeder, and really knew how to tell time! Two hours before dinner, he’d start nosing around. With an hour to go, he would constantly prowl around. With 20 minutes left, he was downright agitated. And as feeding time neared, he’d pace around the feeder in high excitement, often biting it. I told him, “Don’t bite the device that feeds you!”, but that particular lesson didn’t seem to sink in very well. I think he knew exactly what it meant when I sang the “It’s almost time!” dinner song for him.

Speaking of music, Grady had both his own song, poem, and a special rhyming haiku. The song goes like this:

Grady, Grady, Grady cat:
Him not no average little ’fraidy-cat,
But him meows like a little lady cat…

His poem is:

My cat is full of grayness,
From his whiskers to his anus;
It seems to be quite painless.

And that rhyming haiku? Voilà:

My cat’s named Gradle;
He ate a raisin bagel:
It wasn’t fatal.

Perhaps his most unique trick was this: when he was watching you, if you held your hand out and rubbed your fingers together, his eyes would slowly close, as if from happiness. Very strange, but cute!

I’ve included a few good photos in this post, but I really suggest checking out all of Grady’s photos on Flickr. There are some real special pictures in that collection that capture his personality.

None of that, of course, says much about what he meant to me. Let’s just say he was a dear, dear friend, who made every day much better than it would have been without his warm presence.

So, what happened, and why is he gone?

On September 4th, we celebrated the seventh anniversary of his adoption with the traditional wet food treat. He was due for inoculations, so six days later I took him to the vet for his annual checkup. At that point, everything seemed fine, and continued that way for the following week.

The eighth day after his vaccination was Thursday the 18th, and he was his usual active self. The next day, he was lethargic and (for the only time in his life) ambivalent about food. I decided that I’d bring him to the vet if he didn’t improve overnight.

Since he didn’t improve, I brought him in to the vet first thing Saturday morning. He had quite a fever, so they kept him until 4pm, giving him IV fluid and antibiotics.

At the end of the day, he hadn’t improved, and since the vet was closing and wouldn’t be open on Sunday, they advised me to bring him to the animal hospital at Angell Memorial: the same shelter I’d adopted him from.

After an anxious cab ride, I brought him into Angell Saturday night. The doctor planned to run a bunch of tests and give him more fluid and antibiotics, which meant Grady would probably be in the hospital for a couple days.

Sunday his temperature had come down a little, but he wasn’t eating. All the tests they ran came back with only minor variations from normal. More tests needed to be done.

On Monday morning his temperature was back within the normal range. Monday afternoon I got a call from the doctor saying that he seemed normal and stable, but he still wouldn’t eat for them. Given that, she suggested I bring him home, in hopes that he’d be more comfortable and more liable to eat in a familiar environment. I just needed to wait a couple hours for them to get him ready to go, until 8:30pm.

At home, I cleaned out his food, water, and litter containers, in hopeful anticipation of his return. At 8pm, just as I was getting ready to leave, I received a telephone call from the woman who was getting him ready. “He’s in respiratory arrest. Do you want us to resuscitate him? We need an answer right now.”

What? But his fever had broken! The vet had pronounced him stable! Four days previously, he had been a lively and happy cat! And he was only eight years old! This wasn’t supposed to happen!

I was utterly staggered. Grady had spent three days in the hospital, but they had absolutely no idea what was wrong with him. The woman on the phone tried to be tactful while reminding me that even if they resuscitated him, it was likely to be only a temporary, short-term thing. Could I ask Grady to go through more trauma than he’d already endured? Was this his way of telling me that he’d had enough?

In the end, I took it as a sign that it was time for me to let him go. I told them not to resuscitate. They called back five minutes later to tell me that he was gone.

Grady—my lovely baby!—was gone!

I spent most of that night howling the horrible animal pain I felt. The comments I got from friends on Facebook were helpful, albeit to a limited extent. The next day, when I talked to the doctor, I agreed to spend the money to perform a necroscopy seeking answers about why he died.

Ultimately, the necroscopy was of no more use than any of the veterinarians who had treated him. Grady had a few minor health issues, but they found nothing life-threatening. Was his death due to a reaction to his vaccines? Was there anything the vets didn’t do (or anything they did) which contributed to his demise? There was simply no evidence to base an opinion on.

So now he’s gone, and we will never know why. It sucks mightily that we had such a short time together. I was so happy, and I really expected to have a lot more than just seven short years with him.

One of the most difficult emotions is my sense of responsibility for his unexpected and premature death. I mean, I used to look him in the eyes and tell him, “I *own* you…” And he trusted me so meekly when I brought him to the vet for his checkup. And yet, twelve days later he was dead, despite my feebly ineffective good intentions. And his well-being was 100 percent my responsibility. That guilt tears me up from the inside.

The condo, without him and all the cardboard boxes, the toys strewn all over, the food, water, and litterbox: it feels as if I’ve had a roommate move out. The place is silent and empty and lifeless. It might seem odd that living alone feels so radically different than living alone *with a cat*, but so it is. While my friends’ sympathy certainly helps, life just isn’t the same without my lovable little guy.

Seven weeks before Grady’s illness, I rode in my last Pan-Mass Challenge, and spent Sunday night after the ride at my hotel in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. Monday morning, my support person and I went and explored the Sandwich boardwalk, a quarter-mile foot bridge crossing a tidal marsh, connecting a parking lot to the town beach. After storm damage, it had been rebuilt in 1992 and again in 2013 with money raised by allowing people to purchase inscriptions in each wooden plank of the deck.

As we walked along, we read a sampling of planks. As I neared the beach end of the boardwalk, my eyes landed on one which simply read: ♥ U GRADY. Whatever the original intention had been, the plank reminded me of my little roommate, whom I hadn’t seen for four days. For all the feelings that reminder of him evoked, I stopped to snap a picture of it.

I didn’t know then that Grady had only a few weeks left to live.

That photo I impulsively took is now a very poignant memory and perhaps a fitting memorial in honor of my trusting and faithful little roommate, for whom I held so much affection, and who had brought so much warmth and joy into my life. Blessed be, my little one! I’m so, so sorry.

(heart) U GRADY

I’ve already told you about Corrugated Fun, so now it’s time to honor the B-Bar.

High school in the Eighties wasn’t like nowadays. Mom gave you five bucks for your school lunch and you bought whatever you wanted. And your options weren’t exactly crudites and chia seeds.

Me, I’m a self-made man; every day, I’d spend all my lunch money on two or three big chocolate chip cookies and three or four B-Bars. Or as we Mainers say, “Bee-Baaahs”.

What’s a B-Bar? It’s a perfect food: a healthy blend of carbohydrates, protein, and maybe a little bit of fat. It’s your basic vanilla ice cream on a stick, surrounded by a hard chocolate shell. Nothing fancy, but four of those made the perfect school lunch for a happy, growing boy!

Good thing I spent a lot of my spare time running around on the soccer pitch!

Sadly, this staple of my childhood is long gone. The ’B’ in ’B-Bar’ stood for Barnes, the small local dairy that produced it, along with the blue-raspberry popsicles I fondly remember from YMCA camp. Barnes was acquired by Oakhurst or Hood or someone, and the B-Bar went the way of the dodo.

Speaking of which, if anyone happens to know which way that dodo went, I would be curious to know. She seems to have taken a lot of my favorite things with her. Including the B-Bar: gone but never forgotten!

Want to feel old? Just take a look behind you…

I’ve been blogging long enough now to post the third installment in my series of posts remembering people, places, and things that Boston has lost since I moved in.

Nostalgia. Memorabilia. Whatever synonym you use, it’s likely to evoke the same bittersweet morose feeling of loss. So many good times, so many memories, all gone to seed.

At the same time, a city—or at least a living one—needs to change, grow, and evolve to stay interesting and vital. Still, it’s hard to feel as sanguine about new, unfamiliar places as the comfortable, memory-filled things they replace.

This week provided a particularly sad example, in the sudden shuttering of the venerable Boston Phoenix, a free alternative tabloid newspaper that guided two and a half generations of young adults through the vibrant if chaotic maelstrom of Boston youth culture.

The Phoenix was the heart of my Boston experience through my 20s, 30s, and 40s. Clubs, bands, restaurants, classical concerts, lectures, readings, exhibits… If it was worth doing—even if it was way too outré for the mainstream media to touch—you’d find it listed in the Phoenix.

Although I’ve aged and my life has become more mainstream, losing the Phoenix is no less painful. If nothing else, it represented a connection, and sense of continuity with the person I used to be. It was one of the threads that still connected me with that other Ornoth, the younger, more social, and more visceral one whom I grew out of.

But it’s just the most recent example of the Buddhist law of impermanence. Here are a few others, just to remind you that nothing lasts forever, and the great danger of binding your happiness to something impermanent.

Restaurants
Bouchée French restaurant on Newbury
Brown Sugar Cafe in Fenway
Bombay Club in Harvard Square
The Greenhouse in Harvard Square
Pomme Frites in Harvard Square
Brigham’s Ice Cream
Tealuxe on Newbury
Geoffrey's Cafe
Cottonwood Cafe on Berkeley
Herrell’s ice cream in Allston and Harvard Square
J.P. Licks ice cream on Newbury Street
Carberry’s Bakery in Central
Allston’s Sports Depot
Anthony’s Pier 4
The Otherside Cafe
Bhindi Bazaar
Island Hopper
Morton’s Steakhouse
Locke-Ober restaurant
Upper Crust pizzeria
Hard Rock Cafe in Back Bay
Ronnarong Thai restaurant in Union Square
Club Casablanca in Harvard Square
Joe’s American Bar & Grille on Dartmouth (relocated to Exeter)
Papa Razzi Italian restaurant (relocated to Newbury from Dartmouth)
Nightlife
The Kells
TC’s Lounge
Harpers Ferry
Businesses
Pearl Arts & Crafts in Central
Bowl & Board
HMV
Judi Rotenburg Gallery
Nora’s convenience store on Newbury Street
Compleat Strategist on Mass Ave.
Globe Corner Bookstore
Borders bookstores in DTC and Back Bay
Mcintyre & Moore used books in Porter
Copley Flair
Daddy’s Junky Music
Filene’s Basement
Anthropologie
Best Buy at Newbury & Mass Ave.
Fung Wah Chinatown bus to New York
Louis Boston (relocated to Southie)
Bob Slate Stationers (temporarily?)
Media
WBCN
WFNX
Stuff Magazine
The Boston Phoenix
People
Ted Kennedy
Charles Sarkis and the Back Bay Restaurant Group
Government
Massachusetts Turnpike Authority
Metropolitcan District Commission
FastLane

If you’re interested in other stuff that Boston has lost, check out the previous posts in this series: one from 2009 and another from 2005.

Updates: All Asia Cafe, Cambridgeport Saloon, Thailand Cafe, Charley's restaurant on Newbury Street, Crossroads Irish Pub, Bostone Pizza, An Tua Nua pub, Anthony's Pier 4, the Purple Shamrock, Hilltop Steak House in Saugus, Hi-Fi Pizza in Central, Calumet Photo, Steve's Greek restaurant on Newbury Street, Daisy Buchanan's on Newbury Street, India Samraat, Cactus Club, J. Pace & Son North End grocery, Amtrak's ticket office in Back Bay station, Louis Boston, Louie the Tricycle Guy, International Bike in Brighton & Newton, Forum restaurant on Boylston, Bayside Expo Center, MakerBot on Newbury Street, TT the Bears nightclub, Tedeschi convenience stores, the entire food court at the Prudential mall, Berk's shoes in Harvard Square, Church nightclub (formerly Linwood Grill), Scissors & Pie pretentious pizza hovel. Impending closures: Johnny D's, Medieval Manor.

There have been innumerable joys in my life. The awe-inspiring places I’ve seen, the events I’ve experienced, and most importantly the truly amazing people who have touched me and shared my journey. These things I remember.

In the quiet of the night, when I look back at my life I’m astounded by the intensity of that joy. It’s like a summer sun that reveals the wonders of the world and warms you to the core, endlessly giving the gift of life to all. But it’s also intense: the heat and light sometimes becoming too much to bear. It seems impossible for one man’s heart to encompass so much joy. And yet I’ll carry the flaming memory of those joys for the rest of my life.

The sorrows… I’ve been lucky; it doesn’t seem like I’ve had as many sorrows. Mostly they’re about loss: places that I’ll never see again, experiences that cannot be repeated, and the realization that my remaining time on Earth is limited.

But like my joys, my deepest and most intense pains are for the loss of the people whom I have loved, whether that loss comes from death, estrangement, or merely the inevitable changes that come with the passage of time. The only analogy that comes to mind for such pain is of a white-hot bar of steel, burning deep inside. These, too, I remember, and will bear every day that I live.

Lying awake at 4am, thinking about the people I’ve known, I find myself incapable of containing so much joy and sorrow. It leaks out, uncontrolled and raw.

I am the heart of a flame, raging with the heat of innumerable joys and the searing intensity of my sorrows.

For a man who since childhood has been accused of not having any emotions—and I often question it myself—I can’t even begin to conceive of what it would be like for someone to feel these things more intensely than I do, when I allow myself to open my heart to them.

Maybe I’m just particularly good at hiding those feelings, even from myself. It’s something I’m working to overcome.

The essential Boston experience. Come sit with me ’neath the old Brain Tree…

I stare out the window at the passersby on Newbury Street, or sneak peeks at the anonymous bodies crowding a Green Line car and wonder. It’s easy to categorize people. Suits. Computer geeks. Asian students. Red Sox tourists. Construction workers. Counterculture rebels. So many thousands of people, all fitting neatly into a mental model that categorizes and reduces all those individuals into no more than a couple dozen stereotypical profiles, with no more depth than a cardboard cutout. We rarely even grant them the status of fellow humans; to us, they’re more like obstacles.

And yet, I cannot reconcile this with my own sense of individuality. Not because I think I’m so different or special, but because there’s no one out there who shares my experiences.

Those of you who have long-term partners probably won’t remember the terrible loneliness of knowing that no one knows your story, your history. You’ve made enough shared history together that your distant past doesn’t seem so pertinent to who you are anymore. You have today, something immediate that you share with another person, and you can tell stories about the rest. That’s nice, and in some ways I envy you.

Alone—and without summertime distractions like cycling—I can’t help but reflect on my life and its past events. Every place, every experience left some detritus on my memory and in my heart. Sure, I can tell you endless stories about my past. Sitting on the big granite boulder in front of our camp on Moxie Pond, trying to draw Mosquito Mountain. Watching endless cars stop-then-go on the hill in front of our house, which was part of the Maine driver’s test course (a particular treat in winter, when the road was slick and cars often slid backwards onto our front lawn). Playing wargames with 1/700 scale warship models on a gymnasium floor with the owner of Kennebec Books. Swimming in the quarry outside the town we jokingly called “Haiioweii” based on the poorly-designed sign of a friend’s dad’s hardware store. Nights driving home from Jean’s, traipsing around New York City with Linda, racing my new car down the slalom of a Westborough office park, the abandon of being at the edge of the stage for a Concussion Ensemble or Bentmen show… Sorry, I won’t continue. It would, indeed, take a lifetime to write down half the memories I cherish from this wonderful, blessed, broad and wandering life I’ve led. God help me if I’m ever impelled to write an autobiography!

The memory of these experiences is what I most wish to share with someone. In some cases I’m fortunate enough to still be friends with people who were there (probably including you, since you’re reading this). Just recently, three of my… well, three former girlfriends mentioned how much they value the times we shared, that I alone retain and preserve that memory of who they were, and how important that is to them. That’s endlessly gratifying for me, for those common memories are like jewels to me as well, locked away where few will ever see, yet they are the true treasures of my life.

The melancholy comes from the fact that there are people I’ve lost and memories I cannot share, and ultimately there’s no one person who shared and keeps it all, other than myself. People have come and gone throughout my life, and although I’ve been graced to share that path with some truly wonderful people, there’s been no one person who has remained, stayed to be part of it all, who can help me hold all those treasures… It takes more than my two hands, believe me!

I’m not bemoaning life as a bachelor, which (speaking from experience) suits me better than the alternative. It’s just that these memories are such a large part of who I am, and I derived (and still derive) so much enjoyment from them that I wish I could share them. If only I could stay close with the people I shared them with at the time, or find some way to effectively share those experiences with the people who weren’t. So that somehow there’d be a way for someone else to experience the full sum of who I am, who I have been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve seen. And that can never happen.

Bringing this back to where I started, it’s hard for me to reconcile the richness I sense in my own life with our natural inclination to categorize, summarize, and genericize the mass of people around us. I have seen so many things that no one else has, and I feel so attached to those memories… but hasn’t every person out there got the same kind of complex, meaningful, and completely unique history and set of experiences?

And I imagine that, like me, they’re seeking to preserve and share their unique stories. Perhaps the desire to somehow communicate and share that accumulation of memories is why our grandparents spent so much time sitting around telling stories.

My first trip to New York was on November 11, 1984, for a gathering of Internet chat users. Mind you, this was well before IRC was written, or Relay (IRC’s predecessor). In fact, the Internet really wasn’t there yet; it had no interactive messaging facility. I grew up on something called BITNET, one of the consitutent networks that eventually evolved into the Internet. Anyways, this was arguably the first ever Internet chat get-together.

I wasn’t in the best of situations going into it. See, there were these two girls from UConn—Cathy and Randi—whom I was flirting with. Oh, and then my good friend Lothie was coming up, and she and I were kinda getting together somewhat, too. Oh, and have I mentioned that amidst all this bounty, I had my eye on this really cute chick who showed up with someone else? Yeah… That was Linda, my future wife. Those were the days, huh?

That was also the visit where Lothie and I went over to Godiva Chocolatier on 5th Ave, then got caught in one of those abject NYC downpours.

The next trip I remember was three months later, when I took the bus down from Maine to surprise Linda at the computer center at Queens College. I managed to get from Grand Central onto the subway line to Queens all by myself very late one night. Then at one stop, all these huge dirty black guys came on the train with axes and picks and stuff. I eventually clued in that it was a track crew, but it was enough to really scare the little boy from Maine!

There are various memories of trips down to the city while Linda and I were together. Initially, Linda’s parents refused to meet me, so I had nowhere to stay. I remember staying one night at the Bitnic offices, and other nights at a student hostel near Madison Square Garden. In the meantime, I bowled a nearly perfect game at MSG’s bowling alley. I stayed one night on Staten Island with my friend Hillary, and spent several nights during Purim in the basement of an orthodox Jewish household. That was the setting for the worst illness of my life, after I was food poisoned after eating bad Chinese food in Chinatown.

One morning Linda and I were supposed to meet at a subway stop in Manhattan. It was the morning of Hurricane Gloria, in October 1985. Linda didn’t venture out in the storm, but I did, waiting several hours for the storm to pass before I finally gave up and took the train out to her parents’ house. Meanwhile, Linda had left to go look for me, and her folks had no other recourse but to actually answer the door. Thereafter, they loved me, and we didn’t have any more problems with their denying my existence.

Those trips to New York with Linda were great. Hanging around the Village and Washington Square, ice cream at Swenson’s. visiting Tower Records and Forbidden Planet and Star Magic and the Compleat Strategist. Hanging around Astoria and Ditmars Boulevard. Taking the Merritt/Hutchinson River Parkway to the Whitestone. New York pretzels. Each time we returned from Pennsic, her parents’ house was where we got out first warm showers in more than a week. Watching the Superman balloon’s severed hand floating gently to the ground when he got caught in the trees when we went to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade…

Her parents were… unique. Her mother would buy us all kinds of garbage which we had no use for from the Home Shopping Network. In a house with only three people, they had four televisions, and all of them had to be on and blaring at least 98 dB, or else one of them would come into the room and turn it on and start flipping channels. “What! Don’t you like television! Here! Here’s a science program! I love science programs!” And wearing rubber boots is bad because they’ll make your feet swell up and they’ll have to cut them off your feet. Yeah. What do you want; they read and believe what’s written in the New York Post.

After Linda and I separated, I went down to New York a couple times with my buddies Barry and Sean. We did a little clubbing, and I remember hitting a show at the Knitting Factory. We also caught a Blue Man Group show back around 1992 when they were still a small three-person local outfit, and we sat in the absolute back/top of the multi-floor theater, so we got to initiate the big TP-storm at the end. More good times. Well, except for the Fourth of July, when you couldn’t differentiate between the fireworks and the gunshots, and the concussion made all the car alarms in the city go off simultaneously…

Around 1995 I spent a week living in co-worker Steve C.’s West Village apartment while working on a project for Wells Fargo out of Sapient’s Jersey City office. That was a fun time. And I seem to recall hitting a BDSM club on the west side sometime around then.

But my trips to the city were few and far between after that. Alan L. hosted the 1999 DargonZine Writers’ Summit in New York, which included a trip to Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, which Linda had always promised to take me to. We also spent a couple hours on the roof of the World Trade Center towers, enjoying the sun, the breeze, the view, and the surprisingly total silence. Two years later, they (the towers) were gone. It’s still kind of an eerie feeling to have been there not too long before they came down. I haven’t been back to the site since.

I don’t think I went back to New York for eight years after that Summit. About a year ago, I took the Acela down in early December to visit a client—a prestigious lingerie retailer—in midtown. I didn’t have much time, but managed to snag a pretzel and wander around a little.

A month or two ago I had to go down for another meeting with the same client, and had a little more time to walk around (and it was significantly warmer than it had been in December). It was nice, although I still would enjoy spending a week or even just a weekend down there.

In case you can’t tell, I miss New York. It is a cool place to visit and hang around, and it was especially good when I had Linda to serve as a native guide. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there—Boston’s a much more manageable and friendly town—but it’s no further away than Maine, where I go every 4-8 weeks, so I really should be making trips down there more often than once every eight years.

4:52am

Mar. 11th, 2006 06:30 am
4:52am.

It's like having just come from an incredible movie that touched you to the heart, over and over.

And no one else has ever seen it.

No one else has ever even heard of it.

And they'll never get the chance to see it.

You'll never be able to share it with anyone.

"Made mindless" and the Southern Cross.

Berg and the Nakeds.

From Ka-Ve to my wedding to the Paint Lady.

Car magazines and reading primers

Frankenstein and Philadelphia Freedom.

Corrugated fun.

Dodgeball and Seally Pond.

The Saco River and the quarry.

Garnet and Garnett.

Watching the most important person in my life dying in an ICU.

The Bentmen and Concussion Ensemble.

From group love in a Jersey suburb to a different kind of group love in a cottage on a Scottish loch.

Free Enterprise.

Disco duck and "sprots".

Frodo Lives! at the McClurg Court Theater.

Sink the buses and save the nukes.

He's an eviscerator.

Sweet, Abba, and Devo piped thru a jury-rigged speaker system.

Mosquito Mountain and the Devil's Triangle.

Miles and miles of roads and trails that no one else has ever seen.

The Klong Yaw.

Hundred thousand dollar tax bills, and one-cent bank statements.

The Great Lie, and Then Again, Maybe I Won't.

Blond. Egad.

The turn toward Race Point, and resting at the beach afterward.

The campanile of the New Old South Church.

Astoria, and the RR.

Nights at Bill's or the Pluff.

The Toxicmobile. The Glick. The Starship. The Devinci and the Plastic Bullet.

Quack and meow. I'm flabbergasted. Ay-ant! Juggo naiyo.

Fletcher Pratt. "Eh? Did you say munny?" Yes, shut up, Hal.

Playing ball against the wall of the DMV for years at a time.

Compersion, and the ten thousand and one unspoken crushes.

Suits, casual, and back to suits. Purple rugs everywhere. I think the Morale Committee should have considered that.

Pemaquid, Camden, Battie. My tree in Old Town.

The ComDisk, MJJWSMBB, and HSnet.

Mazar Balinu, Carmarade, and DAL-SYS.

Kenny Kinnikinnick, inventor of Gnip Gnop.

Silent summer drives back from girlfriends' homes.

And the Southern Cross.

This is what it's like to grow old.

I've lived my life thinking: while I'm young, I'll live it up. That way I'll have a huge collection of wonderful memories to relive when I get old, and can't do all those fun things anymore.

I guess I'm over the crest of that proverbial hill, because when I look back, I'm filled with hundreds upon hundreds of memories of my life.

I see now why old people feel isolated. It's not because they're alone; it's because they've lived an amazing, deeply touching novel that no one else will ever read.

So many people and places and events have touched my life, but no person will ever share the things I remember, the things that even today bring up deep feelings that toss me around like a toy boat toy boat toy boat.

If you've been part of my life, I owe you something I can never repay. You've honored me greatly, and no matter how small a part you played or how distant the events in question, rest assured that you have touched me, and I remember.

Though no one else can or will, I shall remember, until the end of my days. Namaste, my friend.

Think about how many times I have fallen.
Spirits are using me, larger voices callin'.
What Heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.

It’s been a couple weeks since the Puggle left home, and I’m pretty well adjusted. I think the main source of my anxiety was the thought of him suffering, and not knowing what I could do for him. But now he’s beyond all that. The high drama of his impending death is over, and it’s just a question of adjusting to his absence as a known, unchangeable fact.

However, before my memory of the Puggle fades, I want to take a moment and record some of the wonderful memories he gave me. Some of these are one-time events, and some are just the gifts he gave me every day. I know these probably won’t mean much to you, but I wanted to save them here for future reference, to serve as a remembrance of his character and the companionship he provided.

So here’s the list.

  • Puggie Nose Leather (“Puggie knows leather”)
  • His habit of curling up under the covers and going to sleep behind my knee, with his head on my calf
  • His habit of pawing at the blanket to let me know he wanted to get under the covers
  • His amusing habit of flossing every day using the cord on the blinds
  • How he’d often jump onto my lap while I was sitting at the computer, then putting his front paws on my shoulder, asking to be picked up and given a Huggle
  • How he’d curl up in the crook of my arm while I was sitting up in bed reading
  • The evening ritual of him standing on my chest to get his kitty massage after I climbed into bed
  • How he’d invariably sabotage any attempt to make the bed
  • Our occasional walks in the lobby: his ”constitutionals“
  • How those walks would usually end with him running back to our door after someone in the building spooked him
  • The Puggle Skywalk between the countertop and the kitchen table in the Fenway apartment
  • The total destruction of the door frames in the Fenway apartment
  • The Kitty Crazies, which in the Fenway apartment resulted in him clutching the door frame, suspended four feet off the ground
  • His fuzzy Puggle toes
  • ”Here comes Puggle Claws, here comes Puggle Claws, right down Puggle Claws Lane. He’s a Puggle ’cos he’s got Puggle claws and a little Pug brain…“
  • Sleeping inside a kick drum… amazing
  • His completely predictable hissing at any women who visited
 
  • The time he cleaned my bicycle chain for me and got grease all over his face
  • Climbing through all the kitchen cabinets
  • When I built a little pagoda that allowed him to jump all the way up into the top shelf in the bedroom closet
  • His annoying habit of leaving the bathroom door open after he came in and left while I was showering
  • ”Reach out… touch face.“
  • ”It’s not sex unless the Puggle is watching.“
  • Always leaving one of the kitchen barstool chairs pulled partway out so that he could jump up onto the kitchen counter
  • Coming home after a weekend away and having to have extended love-fests on the bed before anything else
  • His catching a mouse at the Fenway apartment and absolutely having no idea what to do with it
  • His Puggie pantaloons
  • Wanton shredding of cardboard boxes, and tenderizing them beforehand for him with my Benchmade pocket knife
  • Strength-sapping sunbeams
  • His habit of sleeping on the bed above (and sometimes atop) one’s head
  • Waking up in the morning with the Puggle in the same position as me—on his side, with his body under the covers and his head on the pillow, face-to-face with me
  • His climbing up into kitchen cabinet and lying down after I closed the glass doors behind him
  • His taking it upon himself to wash my hair for me back when I had long hair
  • The rising trill (known as ”mipping“) that he’d make when asking a question or jumping up on the bed

Thank you, Puggle. For these, and for everything.

Edited additions:

  • How he’s tell you he'd had enough play by giving you a “nibble”: gently clomping down on you with his teeth, as if to say “I could take a piece out of you if I really wanted, so simmer down, rude boy…”
  • And if you didn’t simmer down, he’d give you “the bunny hop”: grabbing you with his front paws and kicking with his legs and his rear claws out.
 
  • “What kinda cat is he? He's an Eviscerator!”
  • “Cute, cute little Puggie. I wanna make him stay up all night…”
  • His uncanny ability to elude veterinary staff; twice he got away from them and out of the back room, once screaming all the way down the hallway, into the waiting area, and into a corner underneath a table, requiring us to move all their furniture to get him out!

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