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 3rd 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