Back for the Final Sprint

When we catch our breath, I’ll go into detail on how great the South of France was, but then again, most peo­ple already know that it’s a beau­ti­ful, ele­gant and epi­curean delight, so I won’t go sprin­kling this blog with any more clichés. Besides, pic­tures are def­i­nitely worth a thou­sand words in this case, so if I get about 50 of them up on Flickr then I think our vaca­tion will be bet­ter shown.

The fact that it was so easy to for­get our immi­nent depar­ture from Cam­bridge made Saturday’s reen­try all the more of a shock (not to men­tion the 95°F heat and the cab had no famous Amer­i­can Air Con­di­tion­ing!). So we’ve thrown our­selves into pack­ing once more. It feels as if it will never get done, and always be in a state of near chaos.

I’m still a bit jet lagged, get­ting up before dawn and near exhaus­tion at this hour (9:30 PM), and I’m a night per­son! So, I’ll make this entry a bit short.

I think I should acknowl­edge the new set of right-wing blog­gers who have dis­cov­ered me. Appar­ently I’m just a man with­out a coun­try, because even Cam­bridge, MA is too Amer­i­can for me. I had no idea that ‘left­ists’ (which I guess, is what I am) had appro­pri­ated the term ‘lib­eral’, and that 9/11 taught us that the left had destroyed the coun­try. There’s more, but just read the com­ments on the pre­vi­ous entry to get the rest of it.

OK, with­out get­ting too much into a debate, the way I see, it, 9/11 was indeed a tragedy. It was an awful, hor­ri­ble, hate­ful thing and the peo­ple behind it are the worst excuses for human beings the planet has pro­duced for a long time. But the big­ger tragedy is that the US pop­u­lace got so scared, so screwed up, that they were will­ing to fol­low any­one who said that they had The Answer and would Make Them Pay for What They Did. The Repub­li­can lead­ers who claimed they knew what to do, in black and white, con­fi­dent and heroic lan­guage then took advan­tage of that vul­ner­a­bil­ity and gulli­bil­ity to drag the coun­try into war with Iraq, which had noth­ing to do with the attack (yes, that’s a fact and we all know it now — only the truly deluded dis­pute it) . So it’s a tragedy, but not the kind of tragedy of 9/11. It’s some­thing more far­ci­cal, show­ing how eas­ily an une­d­u­cated and irra­tional pop­u­la­tion is per­suaded. It’s a tragedy that the coun­try I grew up in just doesn’t exist any more, not because of 9/11, but because of what the shock of those falling tow­ers allowed peo­ple to get away with.

Final thought: I’m think­ing about how to explain that I really do feel as if I’m being forced out of this coun­try. If I stay and fight, I fear even­tu­ally that I’ll end up in jail or worse. I’m not con­tem­plat­ing any­thing ille­gal, but these days peo­ple are really get­ting spir­ited away in the night, the way it used to be in the old Soviet Union. It’s mostly just peo­ple who have some con­nec­tion to the Mid­dle East, like that poor soul who at one point worked for an Islamic char­ity that it was revealed had fun­neled funds to the terrorists.

Let me put it this way. It’s not as if I went off my rocker and became an under­ground activist. But I feel like a pas­sen­ger in the sub­way car, sit­ting still on the tracks, but the train going by the oppo­site direc­tion is mov­ing with so much force and dom­i­nat­ing the win­dows, so I feel as if I’m drift­ing for­ward (we’ve all felt some­thing like this opti­cal illu­sion at some point in time). So I feel the coun­try lurch fur­ther and fur­ther to the right, and hence, I also feel that my place within it is less and less clear. If being Amer­i­can means being ultra-religious, intol­er­ant, arro­gant and waste­ful, then I guess I don’t want to be one of those. Call me crazy.

Packing, Selling and Packing

We’ve now reached the point where sold (or packed/disassembled) house­hold items are no longer the ‘fat’ of our lives, but some ‘mus­cle’. In other words, stuff that we actu­ally used day to day is now either unavail­able or gone. I can still cook din­ner (fewer pots) and con­nect to the Inter­net (lap­top), so I’m OK, but things sure feel different.

Yes­ter­day the Microwave cart and TV (and com­po­nents) each went to their respec­tive pur­chasers. Today we took apart my office desk, and the desk­top com­puter, screen, periph­er­als and other attach­ments also had to be taken apart so they could be moved of it. It took a long time and we had to clean a lot of accu­mu­lated dust, fur and sticky residue. Every­thing in this house even­tu­ally gets a bit of a sticky film over time, prob­a­bly from cook­ing food. It’s funny (and a lit­tle sad) to see rem­nants of Socrates (and per­haps even his sis­ter Steffi, although she’s been gone for much longer) show up as lit­tle hairs and balls of dusty fur in the cor­ners of fur­ni­ture and at the bot­tom of table legs. Socrates loved to lounge on my desk while I worked, and left much of him­self in the seams over the years. Those cats lived their entire lives in this house, and when we leave, it won’t be just mem­o­ries of them we leave behind, but lots of genetic mate­r­ial. Prob­a­bly not enough to clone a cat from, but cer­tainly enough to make any per­son with a cat allergy react. I hope the new ten­ant is not aller­gic to cats.

There are boxes every­where, in every room. The bed­room is flanked by large gar­ment boxes. The room that I used to call my office con­sists now mainly of small boxes and scat­tered com­puter and periph­er­als. The first floor is dom­i­nated by a pile of boxes and other items where the piano used to be. It’s a good thing, too. In 19 days, the truck pulls up and the movers load all of those boxes. In the mean­time, I’m also pack­ing for our trip to France. Prob­a­bly won’t be able to blog from there, but I’ll update when we get back, for sure.

The Piano has Left the Building/What I Will and Won't Miss

The piano movers came yes­ter­day and took the piano. I put up the sequence of pic­tures I took on Flickr. So one more piece of our life is no longer in Lilac Court. I wish I’d played it more, but I’m glad that it’s going to stay in the fam­ily, so I won’t miss it quite as much.

Speak­ing of miss­ing things, I’ve started to think about the things I’ll miss from here (besides friends, of course). Here are the things I’ll miss, the things I’ll be glad to leave behind, and the things I really won’t care either way:

Things I’ll Miss

1. The Red Sox - now that they are ‘win­ners’. Still, the whole silly ‘curse’ thing was fun, but if I really missed that, I’d move to Chicago. I also liked the Patri­ots, although it’s hard for me to get all weepy about foot­ball. I will miss Super­Bowl Sun­day at my friend Andy’s house. It became an annual culi­nary and social event that we reg­u­lars looked for­ward to. Thanks, Andy.
2. Cod. What a won­der­ful, tasty fish, so mild and com­fort­ing when baked with herb bread crumbs, but­ter and lemon. On the other hand, from all the over-fishing that’s going on, I may not be the only one who’s going to be miss­ing this fish in the near future. While we’re talk­ing food here, I’ll also miss Emma’s Pizza, a pizza par­lor famous from glow­ing write­ups in Newsweek and Zagat, which had to good sense to relo­cate to a nearby cor­ner. Pizza most peo­ple would drive hours for, and I got to walk home with it before it got cold and wash it down from Micro­brew­ery beer, also from across the street. It rarely gets bet­ter than that.
3. Speak­ing of food, I will also miss all the fab­u­lous Ice Cream, includ­ing Toscanini’s , Christina’s, Emack and Bolios, Steve’s, JP Licks, the White Moun­tain Cream­ery and all of the other incred­i­ble dairy con­fec­tionar­ies we have here. Some have called Boston the Ice Cream cap­i­tal of the coun­try, maybe even the world. They’re right.
4. Hay­mar­ket. I love farm­ers’ mar­kets and this one was so authen­tic and cheap, it’s the way some fam­i­lies make ends meet. Where else could you get a bushel of peaches for $2.50 ? Never mind that you had to throw out a third of them because they weren’t so good.
5. Har­vard Davis Square. Har­vard Square used to be a place to hang out and just people-watch, as well as go to nice book­stores. There’s only one book­store left (of the same name), and my favorite was Wordsworth (ask some­one who’s been here a while and they’ll prob­a­bly shed a tear as well). Har­vard has now become pretty much a shop­ping mall and clus­ter of banks. What Har­vard Square used to be like is now, Davis Square (small, inde­pen­dent book stores, cafés, restau­rants, and the Somerville The­atre). Much livelier.
6. Liv­ing in the Intel­lec­tual Capi­tol of North Amer­ica. No other city, any­where, has as many col­leges as Cam­bridge, MA. Yes­ter­day was Har­vard Grad­u­a­tion. Every­where you looked you saw peo­ple in caps and gowns, flow­ers, happy par­ents, and lost dri­vers with out-of-town license plates. The week before it was MIT. Those are the big ones, and there are many smaller ones, many of which, on their own, could be the cen­ter­piece of a Uni­ver­sity town.
7. Memo­r­ial Drive. Noth­ing more beau­ti­ful than a Sun­day in the late Sum­mer or Fall walk­ing along the Charles River. In the evening we’d take bread crusts to feed the ducks. Sadly, pol­lu­tion has since has caused them to leave.
8. Speak­ing of Fall, the Fall col­ors were some­thing to ooh and ah about every year. I love that sea­son, and late Sep­tem­ber was always a treat.
9. Being close to Ver­mont. The thing that prob­a­bly makes me the sad­dest about leav­ing the US is leav­ing Ver­mont, one of the country’s sav­ing graces. I’ll also miss Tan­gle­wood and Dublin, New Hamp­shire. Where I got my music fix each sum­mer vis­it­ing The Walden School, a fan­tas­tic sum­mer pro­gram I attended as a stu­dent eons ago, and taught as a fac­ulty mem­ber not much more recent than that.

Things I’ll be Glad to Leave Behind

1. Logan Air­port. They should never be for­given for let­ting the ter­ror­ists on not one but two planes on 9/11. I wouldn’t be so hard on them, but for the fact that it was later revealed that the head of secu­rity for the air­port at the time had got­ten that cushy job by being the Governor’s chauf­feur. Favors for fam­ily and friends put the whole coun­try at risk. On a more triv­ial level, the place is still filthy, ugly, dif­fi­cult to get around in, dif­fi­cult to land on, and an all-around dis­grace. The best thing they can do is to shut the whole thing down. Build an air­port off-shore on an arti­fi­cial island like the Chi­nese did (hey, why not another Big Dig!) I’m going to be thrilled not to have to return home via Logan. It’s a pity so many do.
2. Repub­li­can Gov­er­nors. Now admit­tedly, I did vote for William Weld, but that was because the only alter­na­tive was a maniac named John Sil­ber, who was so dis­agree­able that I would have voted in Ghengis Kahn over him. (Well, almost). Unfor­tu­nately, after Weld (who was stopped in mid-career by none other than that Nean­derthal, Jesse Helms), there have been a suc­ces­sion of GOP gov­er­nors in Mass­a­chu­setts (Cel­luci and now Rom­ney), and each one has been just as bad
3. Liv­ing in a User-Hostile City. Boston has an atti­tude: Sig­nage is for sissies; you should just know where you are, so don’t bother ask­ing for direc­tions. That includes roads as well as the T (sub­way). If you’re with lug­gage and come in via AMTRAK at South Sta­tion, you’ll never be able to find an ele­va­tor. Take if from me, I couldn’t, and I’ve lived here nearly 20 years! I also prob­a­bly don’t need to men­tion that Boston dri­vers are known through­out the coun­try for being the among the most aggres­sive and rude. I sus­pect that I’ve picked up some of the dri­ving style and will have to work to tone it down.
4. The Win­ters. In fact, the weather in gen­eral is far from pleas­ant. Not only were win­ters very cold and snowy, but sum­mers were not that com­fort­able either. Boston also seems to lack any kind of a Spring, temperature-wise. You go from too cold to too hot in a day. I wish we could have got­ten more than 1 or 2 days of 72°F/22°C per year. It’s cur­rently a steamy 79°F/26°C, and it’s only June!
5. Gov­ern­ment Cen­ter. Well, no one likes that place. It is truly one of most unat­trac­tive build­ings ever built. Every­body in Boston knows it’s hor­ri­ble, but in all the years I’ve lived here, not a soul has been able to get any con­cen­sus on what to do about it. What a waste of space and a lost opportunity!

Where I Won’t Care Either Way

1. The Big Dig. It never affected us, and now that it’s done, depend­ing on who you ask, it was either a mar­vel of engi­neer­ing or a shame­ful piece of polit­i­cal pork (or both). I think it’s just a big tun­nel. And although the Bunker Hill/Leonard Zakim bridge is pretty, we’ve actu­ally never dri­ven on it. Big Deal. What really needs help are the roads above ground. The pot­holes out­num­ber the pigeons.
2. Liv­ing Amongst Colo­nial His­tory. While I did once par­tic­i­pate in what I’d like to think was an impor­tant dig­i­tal media project around the Boston Free­dom Trail some years ago, I have to say that I’ve just had it with the city’s attempt to turn itself into Ye Olde Yan­kee Theme Parke. As the local gov­ern­ment and builders pre­serve one of the ugli­est build­ings in the city (the old City Jail) as part of a Med­ical Cen­ter build­ing project just across the river, I’ve come to the real­iza­tion that too much rev­er­ence of the past can be almost as bad as not enough.
3. The Boston Accent. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of, and I can cer­tainly do a ver­sion of it, but hav­ing that Boston ‘pahk your cahr’ sound nei­ther enhances nor detracts from peo­ples’ impres­sion of you. At worst you sound like an idiot. At best, (as Jon Stew­art of the Daily Show has some­times said) you sound like Mayor Quimby from The Simp­sons. Who knows, I might get all teary-eyed when I hear one years from now, but thanks to the fact that NPR’s Car Talk is heard every­where from Con­stan­tino­ple to Tim­buktu, I don’t think that will happen.
4. The Kennedys. Pam saw Ted Kennedy once at the air­port. I stood next to Bill Weld and Michael Dukakis (at dif­fer­ent times) on the T, but never a Kennedy.
5. The North End. This small Ital­ian neigh­bor­hood was sup­posed to be famous for great food. Frankly, I was dis­ap­pointed more often than not. The sand­wiches at Il Panino could be very good though.

Those are the lists I could think up in these last few days. There will be more that I dis­cover, and Ali­son Rose (who has left some nice com­ments here) has a run­ning appre­ci­a­tion in her blog of things New Eng­land, Everything’s SFNE. Here’s to only remem­ber­ing the good things, which mem­ory always does for us.

What Might have Been and Another Canada Tip

My friend Sooz took this great pic­ture of Howard Dean a few years ago, when he came to Boston for a spe­cial Rally called ‘Democ­racy, Free­dom, Action’ in Cop­ley Square. I remem­ber it well, because I designed the T-Shirts for the event. (the front of the shirt had those words in white type on a blue shirt, the back had the date and ‘I was there’). The pic­ture brought a lot of nos­tal­gia for me for the recent past. This was per­haps near the height of Dean’s pop­u­lar­ity. He had enor­mous crowds in New York, Seat­tle and Philadel­phia. His pic­ture appeared on the cov­ers of both Time and NewsWeek. As you can see by the pic­ture, there was quite a wind. I remem­ber that well too, because I was pretty far back in the crowd, hold­ing up one pole of an enor­mous sign (for­got what it said, but it was prob­a­bly some­thing like the ‘Bean­town is Dean­town’ sign at the podium). The wind threat­ened to pull us down, so there were some moments of excite­ment not entirely due to the speaker. In just a short time, Dean would lose the Iowa Cau­cuses and then crash to earth as a result of his famous ‘scream’ (which was really just a pep talk with the direc­tional mike for the Pub­lic Address sys­tem fed directly into the news cov­er­age source input).

Dean is now chair­man of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party, but already the press is try­ing to por­tray him as a hot­head, and that other Democ­rats are ‘dis­tanc­ing them­selves from him’ because he dared utter the words “I think Tom Delay ought to go back to Hous­ton, where he can serve his jail sen­tence” at the Mass State Con­ven­tion a month or so ago. I admire the fact that Dean still has the guts to stand up to the Repub­li­cans, but as you can see, he can’t win against a media and gov­ern­ment dom­i­nated by the forces that con­tinue to mar­gin­al­ize him. He would have made a hell of a great Pres­i­dent (not just a good one), and now he’s just painted as a snarling crack­pot who the rest of the party claims does not rep­re­sent them.

Back to Real­ity
The tag sale is over. We sold most of what we needed to, and it was bet­ter than leav­ing it on the curb (although not much). The remain­ing large items, with the excep­tion of our bed, are already spo­ken for. I think I might just leave a mes­sage on Craig’s list detail­ing where the bed will be on the morn­ing that we leave, and hope that some sharp-eyed neti­zen will pick it up. With the excep­tion of the bag and the frame, it’s like new, so hope­fully it will be a nice find. My par­ents gra­ciously bought the piano — it’s being shipped to my brother in Seat­tle, where he will be able to play it — as I will when I visit him.
More Immi­gra­tion Tips
Another in my series of tips to those who want to emi­grate to Canada:
Get your dri­ving record, which you can order directly from your local Depart­ment of Motor Vehi­cles. Do not use drivingrecord.com, who utterly botched my order and actu­ally can­celled it. Good thing they did, as I was nearly stuck pay­ing twice as much by rely­ing on their lit­tle (if any) added value.
Why do you need your dri­ving record? Two reasons:

1. If you want to get a Cana­dian driver’s license and want to avoid hav­ing to first get a learner’s per­mit and then hav­ing to take a dri­ving test (and pay the fees for these), the dri­ving record comes in handy.
2. If your dri­ving record is good, it can help get you a dis­count on your auto insur­ance. Appar­ently this can add up to $50 a month in sav­ings, accord­ing to one report I saw.

The Incredible Lightness of Moving

Pam is really excited about the idea of cast­ing off all these old and inher­ited poses­sions. She sees them as encum­brances: We never use that sec­ond pitcher. We’ve used that Fon­due pot 3 times in 15 years. I never liked those can­dle­sticks or that set of cups. (Some of that was from me, too) Away they go, tossed aside like so much extra cloth­ing by a per­son enter­ing a nud­ist colony. Pam claims that she won’t miss any of them, and I’m hop­ing that she doesn’t change her mind. I’m cer­tainly not some­one who hangs on to every item I’ve ever come to own, but I have to admit that it will be some time before I can be as ruth­less regard­ing the shed­ding of mem­o­ra­bilia as she can be.

As we sell off these pos­ses­sions (often at just a hair above giv­ing them away), our poundage on the van mov­ing across coun­try goes down and down. Soon it will be just the liv­ing room fur­ni­ture, some books, com­puter equip­ment, and some small appli­ances. This is good because as I’ve men­tioned before, movers charge by the pound.

We lost some major poundage today, but not by sell­ing it. It became clear that the bed can’t go. Well, it could, but it would be highly imprac­ti­cal. Here’s what happened:

We have a water bed. Not one of those groovy vel­vet bags that sloshed their way through the Ford and Carter eras, but a wave­less vari­ety that had a ‘shell’ that fit over a wood frame sit­ting on a plat­form and a plas­tic bag within the frame filled with many gal­lons of water. We got it 15 years or so ago from ‘Big John’s Beds’ in Cam­bridge shortly after mov­ing into our present home. The ‘bag’ for the water is the orig­i­nal that came with the bed (never replaced, as often is the case) and is well beyond its pro­jected life expectancy.

The bag was a pain to fill and even more of a pain to drain. In fact, when you drained it, the poly­ester (or some other poly­mer) fibers that negated the wave motion inevitably would get tan­gled up and we’d have to bring it into Big John’s shop to have some­one unknot the gnarled ball they had become. So we thought: great, we’re due to get a new bag, and we’ll just get a brand new one, drain the old one on the morn­ing we leave, and leave it on the curb, for the garbage men to pick up, and take a new bag, with 15 years of life now to go.

Wouldn’t you know, our bed’s man­u­fac­turer real­ized what a pain it was to move the bed (with the afore­men­tioned knot­ting of it’s innards), and if it sprung a leak, the whole bag had to be replaced, etc. . So they stopped mak­ing them years ago and started mak­ing the bed out of a series of sep­a­rately fil­l­able tubes. OK, we thought, why not just replace the big old bag with the new tubes. No dice, Big John (or rather his help­ful sales­per­son) said. The frame and shell for the new tube-style beds are com­pletely dif­fer­ent. We’d essen­tially have to buy a brand new bed. So we could buy the bed here, and pay for the shipping/moving of it, but it hardly makes sense. So, we are going to leave the bed here and buy a new one in Canada. We can’t even legally sell the old bed in Mass­a­chu­setts because of health reg­u­la­tions. So our load just lighted con­sid­er­ably. No mat­tress, no bed, no bed frame. We’ll buy that when we get there. In fact, it does make some sense, because we’ll prob­a­bly arrive and start set­ting up house at least a week and a half before our fur­ni­ture reaches the Cana­dian bor­der from Wash­ing­ton State. Every day that we can stay in the apart­ment and not in a hotel is money saved. So a new bed pays for itself in a fairly short amount of time.

Still, I loved that bed. Hope we can find one that is at least as nice.