The MIT Flea

Mak­ing a major move also means that you will prob­a­bly not be mov­ing every­thing you own. Unless you are like Beethoven, who was known to load up all of his valu­ables in a horse-drawn cart and then drag them to his new abode on foot (and the cart got piled higher and higher with each move, until it tow­ered above the street), you usu­ally end up get­ting rid of a lot of your accu­mu­lated items to avoid mov­ing them.

I’ve lived in Boston for nearly 20 years, and together with Pam in this town­house for 15 years (in June). That’s a lot of time to col­lect lots of stuff. I know I sound like George Car­lin (who did a long riff/rant on stuff in Brain Drop­pings, I believe), but I know I have too much stuff. There’s this house full of stuff, and a stor­age room (our most recent one is in Lynn, MA), where we keep things like Pam’s bicy­cle, all of our lug­gage, and var­i­ous other junk that would show up in our garage, if we had one. My office is one big pile of stuff. Com­puter stuff, music stuff, book stuff, Walden School stuff, CD (both ROM and Audio) stuff, soft­ware stuff and worst of all, paper stuff. It’s get­ting bet­ter, but it still has a long way to go. I’ve got papers every­where. It was worst when I moved my office stuff from my cube at Fidelity (where I had already man­aged to amass a year’s worth of stuff) back home. Some of that stuff went to the afore­men­tioned stor­age unit in Lynn, and some of it just went into this office. I’m going to stop list­ing all of this, because I’m sound­ing not only like George Car­lin, but also like Andy Rooney, and we wouldn’t want that.

So we are in jettison/divest mode. Get rid of it. I don’t care if you give it away, throw it away, or sell it, just get it out of our lives before the move. I’ve writ­ten about sell­ing the piano, which I think we’ve found a buyer for. That’s a big first step. Now, this com­ing Sun­day, we’ll be going to the first 2005 MIT Flea mar­ket. If you haven’t been to the MIT Flea, you are miss­ing the chance to come face-to-face with the tech­nol­ogy sub­cul­ture in it’s purest and most ven­er­a­ble venue. Started by the MIT Radio Soci­ety in the dis­tant past (they started the Radio Soci­ety in 1909, so in a few years it will cel­e­brate its cen­ten­nial!), the Flea is every 3^rd Sun­day of the month from April to Octo­ber and takes place in a park­ing garage near Kendall Square bounded on all sides by BioTech behe­moths, much in the way that Willy Loman’s house was sur­rounded by sky­scrap­ers in Death of a Sales­man. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing holdover from the days of radio tubes (yes, even before transistors!).

These days you’ll find every­thing from flat screen mon­i­tors and tele­phone equip­ment to odd­i­ties like Color Mac Clas­sics, NeXT Machines, DEC-VAX’s and those are just the com­puter junk. You’ll also find some of the most eccen­tric geeks on the planet. One fix­ture of the flea is a guy with an orig­i­nal (and still oper­a­tional) Enigma machine — that’s a code-breaking mechan­i­cal device from WWII! I’ve got­ten CDs, phones, portable fans and flash­lights, speak­ers and head­phones, as well as all kinds of odds and ends like cabling, USB Hubs, power strips and Linux releases. We’ve sold there too, and this time we’ll be bring­ing in a cou­ple of mon­i­tors, a beige G3 Pow­er­Mac from the mid-90’s, a caller-ID dis­play, a cou­ple of old X-10 com­puter inter­faces, a Microsoft opti­cal mouse, a ton of old Mac soft­ware, a cou­ple of stacks of books, and a bunch of old music CDs and LPs.

See, I told you we had a lot of stuff. Hope­fully this will lighten our load some­what, as well as bring in a lit­tle cash.

A Day Trip to North Adams, MA

Since we’ll be mov­ing far­ther away from friends and some rel­a­tives, we’re now tak­ing some time to visit with them. In this case, we met our friends Rob and Laura in North Adams, a small mill town in the North West­ern cor­ner of Mass­a­chu­setts, near the bor­ders of New York and Ver­mont. North Adams’ claim to fame is the Mass­a­chu­setts Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art (or Mass MoCA).

After meet­ing up at the museum for lunch and wan­der­ing around the place, we decided that we had enough of aes­thetic stim­u­la­tion, and drove to the nearby Nat­ural Bridge to get some air and take in the early spring sun. Near the end of the day, we all went to Williams, MA, home to Williams Col­lege, which is, as you would expect, a lovely small college-town, where we had a nice Thai din­ner at a local restaurant.

I’ve known Rob since my under­grad days (we were long-time room­mates), and it’s always great to see him. He’s an ama­teur actor and once again in a com­mu­nity the­atre pro­duc­tion (play­ing the But­ler in a bed­room farce), so hope­fully we’ll get to see them again in their home in Rox­bury Con­necti­cut. Laura is an artist and we have a piece of hers in our liv­ing room/dining room. She’s also a fine singer and I did a lit­tle work on the web site for her harp and voice duo, Arpa-vocé last month.

It was a good day to be out and enjoy­ing the spring weather, espe­cially with friends who I’m hop­ing will visit us after the move.

Trip Wrap-Up

We’re back in Boston, after what I think was a kind of water­shed trip.

As Pam noted, we were in a bit of funk before we left. We were focused on the absence of Socrates, and this in turn led us to con­tem­plate the past. This trip to Van­cou­ver helped us make more of a clean break. Instead of dwelling on ‘He used to hang out here’ or ‘Now was the time when he’d usu­ally make a cute noise or sit on your mou­s­ing arm.’ it was ‘Here’s where we might live’ or ‘There is where you might work’. We thought about what we’ll be doing in a few months, or what we might need to do a few years down the road. We tried to imag­ine our­selves in a new house, in a new job, in a new coun­try. My friend Andy calls it a ‘Life Mul­li­gan’. I didn’t under­stand the term at first, but he explained that a Mul­li­gan is a term from golf, mean­ing essen­tially a ‘do-over’. You get them in a polite game. I sus­pect it’s named after some des­per­ately bad golfer who always asked if he could retake his dri­ves or putts.

(Hah! I just found it on About.com and it’s appar­ently a Cana­dian term. Accord­ing to one of the many mys­te­ri­ous ety­molo­gies of the term, a promi­nent hote­lier named David Mul­li­gan (sic) ‘fre­quented St. Lam­bert Coun­try Club in Mon­treal, Que­bec, dur­ing the 1920s. Mul­li­gan let it rip off the tee one day, wasn’t happy with the results, re-teed, and hit again. Accord­ing to the story, he called it a “cor­rec­tion shot,” but his part­ners thought a bet­ter name was needed and chris­tened it a “mul­li­gan.” Per­haps because Mr. Mul­li­gan was a promi­nent busi­ness­man — own­ing mul­ti­ple hotels — the term was more likely to catch on.’ At any rate, I like that the­ory, espe­cially since the guy is both a David and a Cana­dian.)

Any­way, Life Do-Over or not, we def­i­nitely seem to be restart­ing, and this trip made the Restart­ing line seem a bit closer and clearer. We walked the city of Van­cou­ver sev­eral times, took the Sky­train way out into the ‘burbs and back again in a big loop. We walked in parks, over the Granville Bridge (much to my dis­com­fort, as I still do not like walk­ing near the edge of pre­cip­i­tous areas like bridge side­walks), and to many places we would like to fre­quent (the Pub­lic Library, the Sym­phony Hall, the Sea Wall — that last one by Pam alone). We looked at poten­tial con­do­mini­ums, watched for apart­ment rental signs, read news­pa­pers, watched some local TV and lis­tened to CBC radio. We bought food at local gro­ceries, pro­duce stands and bakeries.

As for me, I hus­tled, schmoozed and did my best to learn about the local busi­ness scene, sign­ing up with 2 recruiters, and already inter­view­ing with 2 local busi­nesses. My expe­ri­ences were nearly all encour­ag­ing. I have a strong resume, lots of great expe­ri­ence, and I just have to work on how I present my port­fo­lio (a lit­tle rusty at that, I must admit). I found most peo­ple polite, inter­est­ing to talk to, and curi­ous about why a per­son from Boston would want to relo­cate to little-old Van­cou­ver, which does have a bit of a self-image of being a back­wa­ter eco­nom­i­cally. If this is true, I’m hop­ing that the ‘big­ger fish in a smaller pond’ metaphor does hold true, and I’ll be able to make a name for myself there.

Frankly, given that the cul­ture is so rich with so many immi­grants (tons of peo­ple from China and India), the cli­mate is so mild, the vis­tas so breath­tak­ing, the local gov­ern­ment enlight­ened and the pop­u­lace tol­er­ant, it’s only a mat­ter of time before the world begins to notice that this is one of the best places in the world in which to reside. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure I’ll miss Boston a lot, but with it’s polit­i­cal infight­ing, frigid win­ters, rude­ness, obses­sion with the Colo­nial past and theme park exploita­tion of it’s own her­itage, not to men­tion the abom­i­na­tions of Logan Air­port, the Hynes Con­ven­tion Cen­ter and Gov­ern­ment Cen­ter (ick, yuck and yech! respec­tively), I’m going to have to say that it’s time for me to check out some new places.

A thought just came to me. At Pam’s and my wed­ding, some of Pam’s Aunts came over to us after the reception/luncheon, where we served Vichysoise, Poached Salmon withe some assorted sauces, rasp­berry coulis, and Pra­line cake for a wed­ding cake. They exclaimed how they had never eaten any­thing like that before. In fact, I learned that one of them had rarely ven­tured out­side her 10-mile radius of Quincy. OK. Time to go now.

writ­ten while lis­ten­ing to: Strauss — Vier Let­zte Lieder — i. Früh­ling from the album “Strauss: Vier Let­zte Lieder” by Jessye Nor­man, soprano, The Leipzig Gewand­haus Orches­tra con­ducted by Kurt Masur