Next stop...North Station
My taxi pulls up across the street from North Station. Something is different. I sling my back pack over my shoulder and look around. I can’t put my finger on it. “The entrance is over there, hun,” the taxi driver says to me out the window pointing across the street, “where that white truck is. Just go in through there.” He thinks my pause is because I’m lost. “Oh, I know. Thanks.” I slam the door and wave to him and head down the street. A guy leaning up against the wall of a convenience store smiles at me and nods as he takes his cigarette break. I pass by the Harp and look in. Guys in Red Sox jerseys drinking pints on a Saturday afternoon. Posters on the door advertising this weekend‘s events sponsored by Budweiser. Nothing different there. In a few hours this place will be packed with college kids dancing to Top 40 hip hop spun by DJ Jazzy Trevor. Downstairs: drama in the ladies room with the flooded out stall and the overflowing trash bin. Upstairs: guys from Malden and Quincy and Waltham wearing their lucky hats with the lids that took them a year to get to just the right curve keep one eye on the game and the other on the low rise jeans doing the circuit around the bar.
I cross the street and look up. Ah! They finally took down the elevated T tracks! And further down, the Central Artery, that ugly steel monstrosity looming above the street is gone! It even sounds ugly, “Central Artery“: “There’s a problem with the Central Artery.“ “The Central Aht-ah-ree is backed all the way to the tanks,” so says Joe in the BZ copter. It was always unnatural and cancerous and problematic. Down here, near the former Boston Garden, these elevated structures made everything dark and dirty and claustrophobic and generally sketchy no matter the time of day. It was almost subterranean. They cast weird shadows and everything echoed and rattled. People skitted like sewer rats across the street, navigating the steel beams and the constant construction, trying not to breathe in the smog. Truly, it looked like a bad set from one of those low-budget action films - you know, the urban version of the dock scene or the warehouse scene - where the bad guys come around the corner out of the steam coming up from the manhole and from behind the steel beam of some random structure that is there just so some bad guy can come out from behind it, and everything is a little wet and a lot grimy and the lighting is harsh and streaky, cutting slices through the dark, and the movie critic in you says, “Where the hell is there a place like this? I mean come on!” But now, the sun! The sun is hitting the ground, hitting my face, hitting the Harp for Chrissakes! The air is no longer stagnant, smelling of dirty metal and exhaust. Man oh man. A scab has been removed.
I walk into North Station and spend $4.50 on a one-way ticket on the Rockport line. I love that name: Rockport. That and Stockbridge are my two favorites. Something about the K sound, I think, and they sound so New Englandy or something. I have a half hour to kill so I head over to the Dunkin Donuts counter. Nothing appeals to me but I order a medium French Vanilla regular out of nostalgia or old habit. “Regular” in Dunkin Donuts language means cream and sugar. I don’t really drink flavored coffees now, and I don’t usually use sugar anymore, but “French Vanilla Regular” is sort of all one word and you really can’t order it any other way - it‘s like illegal or something - so I order my frenchvanillaregulah.
My first full time job was as a secretary in the Human Resources department of a bank. That’s when I first started drinking coffee, and of course, as is required by Massachusetts Zoning Law, there was a Dunkin Donuts half a block away. It was a decent job and they certainly never made me fetch coffee, but I liked getting out so I would do a coffee run most mornings. I can still remember the orders. Most were frenchvanillaregulahs but Cathy the payroll person got a large French Vanilla extra light with four sugars. Easy enough to remember. Hard to understand why she couldn‘t figure out why she couldn‘t lose weight. And Virgina the little old lady in benefits always ordered a small half-French Vanilla, half-Hazelnut with just the tiniest splash - yes she wrote down “splash” on the post-it - of milk and one sugar. Virginia was a pain in the ass with stuff like that, but she was this ex-nun with major men-issues and an always-interesting if somewhat whacked way of looking at things, and I genuinely liked her, so I made sure they got her order right.
The Eastern European woman behind the counter is fast and efficient and never once looks at me. I imagine after a few hours in this place, people just become a blur. I take my coffee and leave her a dollar tip. The lid is new. Pretty cool actually. Quite a good design, the way the tab pulls back and actually secures itself. I take a sip. God, it’s like diabetes in a cup! And so weak compared to the rocket fuel French-pressed to within an inch of its life that I enjoy nowadays. I go back and order a bottle of water, knowing I’m not going to drink much of the coffee.
All the benches are taken. People are sitting on the ground, talking to each other, chatting on their cell phones, reading books. Locals who have taken the kids into the city for the day to kick around Fanuiel Hall and the Museum of Science with a promise to stop at McDonalds if they are good. Tired service workers from Chelsea and Lynn still in their uniforms, closing their eyes and trying to find that little bit of peace amongst the hyper children with butterflies and cat whiskers painted on their faces. College freshman from the small seaside towns on the North Shore going home for the weekend, feeling grown up and giddy but trying to look bored and blasé with their noses in a Lit 101 book.
I pick my spot up against the wall between a college girl on her cell phone, a paperback Candide abandoned on her lap, and two other girls chatting about music, bags from the Garment District packed around them. I smile and slide down the wall settling myself onto the floor, taking off the hat I just bought at the Garment District, shutting off my iPod and pulling Lolita out of my back pack. And I wonder why I’m often mistaken for an undergrad.
So here I am, living in Cambridge, single again, minorly giddy, genuinely bored and blasé, heading to Beverly for my friend April’s bachelorette party. Later in the night, we will wind up back in town, but we’re starting off at Kerry’s place in Beverly and having drinks and dinner there first, and like most things in my life, for me this is a circuitous route but will wind up worthwhile in the end.
I cross the street and look up. Ah! They finally took down the elevated T tracks! And further down, the Central Artery, that ugly steel monstrosity looming above the street is gone! It even sounds ugly, “Central Artery“: “There’s a problem with the Central Artery.“ “The Central Aht-ah-ree is backed all the way to the tanks,” so says Joe in the BZ copter. It was always unnatural and cancerous and problematic. Down here, near the former Boston Garden, these elevated structures made everything dark and dirty and claustrophobic and generally sketchy no matter the time of day. It was almost subterranean. They cast weird shadows and everything echoed and rattled. People skitted like sewer rats across the street, navigating the steel beams and the constant construction, trying not to breathe in the smog. Truly, it looked like a bad set from one of those low-budget action films - you know, the urban version of the dock scene or the warehouse scene - where the bad guys come around the corner out of the steam coming up from the manhole and from behind the steel beam of some random structure that is there just so some bad guy can come out from behind it, and everything is a little wet and a lot grimy and the lighting is harsh and streaky, cutting slices through the dark, and the movie critic in you says, “Where the hell is there a place like this? I mean come on!” But now, the sun! The sun is hitting the ground, hitting my face, hitting the Harp for Chrissakes! The air is no longer stagnant, smelling of dirty metal and exhaust. Man oh man. A scab has been removed.
I walk into North Station and spend $4.50 on a one-way ticket on the Rockport line. I love that name: Rockport. That and Stockbridge are my two favorites. Something about the K sound, I think, and they sound so New Englandy or something. I have a half hour to kill so I head over to the Dunkin Donuts counter. Nothing appeals to me but I order a medium French Vanilla regular out of nostalgia or old habit. “Regular” in Dunkin Donuts language means cream and sugar. I don’t really drink flavored coffees now, and I don’t usually use sugar anymore, but “French Vanilla Regular” is sort of all one word and you really can’t order it any other way - it‘s like illegal or something - so I order my frenchvanillaregulah.
My first full time job was as a secretary in the Human Resources department of a bank. That’s when I first started drinking coffee, and of course, as is required by Massachusetts Zoning Law, there was a Dunkin Donuts half a block away. It was a decent job and they certainly never made me fetch coffee, but I liked getting out so I would do a coffee run most mornings. I can still remember the orders. Most were frenchvanillaregulahs but Cathy the payroll person got a large French Vanilla extra light with four sugars. Easy enough to remember. Hard to understand why she couldn‘t figure out why she couldn‘t lose weight. And Virgina the little old lady in benefits always ordered a small half-French Vanilla, half-Hazelnut with just the tiniest splash - yes she wrote down “splash” on the post-it - of milk and one sugar. Virginia was a pain in the ass with stuff like that, but she was this ex-nun with major men-issues and an always-interesting if somewhat whacked way of looking at things, and I genuinely liked her, so I made sure they got her order right.
The Eastern European woman behind the counter is fast and efficient and never once looks at me. I imagine after a few hours in this place, people just become a blur. I take my coffee and leave her a dollar tip. The lid is new. Pretty cool actually. Quite a good design, the way the tab pulls back and actually secures itself. I take a sip. God, it’s like diabetes in a cup! And so weak compared to the rocket fuel French-pressed to within an inch of its life that I enjoy nowadays. I go back and order a bottle of water, knowing I’m not going to drink much of the coffee.
All the benches are taken. People are sitting on the ground, talking to each other, chatting on their cell phones, reading books. Locals who have taken the kids into the city for the day to kick around Fanuiel Hall and the Museum of Science with a promise to stop at McDonalds if they are good. Tired service workers from Chelsea and Lynn still in their uniforms, closing their eyes and trying to find that little bit of peace amongst the hyper children with butterflies and cat whiskers painted on their faces. College freshman from the small seaside towns on the North Shore going home for the weekend, feeling grown up and giddy but trying to look bored and blasé with their noses in a Lit 101 book.
I pick my spot up against the wall between a college girl on her cell phone, a paperback Candide abandoned on her lap, and two other girls chatting about music, bags from the Garment District packed around them. I smile and slide down the wall settling myself onto the floor, taking off the hat I just bought at the Garment District, shutting off my iPod and pulling Lolita out of my back pack. And I wonder why I’m often mistaken for an undergrad.
So here I am, living in Cambridge, single again, minorly giddy, genuinely bored and blasé, heading to Beverly for my friend April’s bachelorette party. Later in the night, we will wind up back in town, but we’re starting off at Kerry’s place in Beverly and having drinks and dinner there first, and like most things in my life, for me this is a circuitous route but will wind up worthwhile in the end.
posted by Rebecca at 4:52 PM
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