up to boston (lyn)

I leave the house early for an uneventful Bolt bus ride to Boston.  $15, good fellow riders, and non-stop.  Maybe I can learn to like busses.  I arrive early and pick up three D'Angelo tuna subs at South Station.  Fattening and delicious.  V, a good friend of M’s and mine, picks me up.

We go to M’s to help her.  We’ve offered and she’s uncharacteristically accepted.  We arrive and M, under any circumstances, looks great.  I hug her and notice how much less there is of her to hug.  Our assignments are unrelated to anything funereal.  V is an expert wrapper and helps M with her Christmas wrapping.  It’s a skill I envy as any gift I wrap looks like it's from a 3-year old’s art class.  I’m assigned a photography project.

V and I leave around 7 and go to her 1813 gorgeous home (an actual house in the heart of Charlestown).  The streets are narrow and the history is wide; you can see Bunker Hill from her house and easily imagine Paul Revere riding through the streets.  Dinner is at Fig’s, a hip Todd English pizza restaurant near V’s home.  We split an order of pan-braised mussels with a roasted tomato-base sauce that is so good we must eat two more pieces of bread to sop it up.  The pizza we split (and don’t finish) is thin, half salad and half fig and prosciutto (which fortunately I don’t like).

It feels good to be back in a place that was once home, with friends of almost 30 years.  I just wish the circumstances for my being here were different.