Long weekend

Arrival:
Deep green spreads out through the bay. Tendrils of white foam streak across the surface like scratch marks. Oh yeah, this isn't your little lake anymore. This is the ocean and this water means business.

We curve around over the bay full of familiar land forms. Deer Island with its huge sewage containers that look like milk jugs left on the city's front stoop. Lovell's Island where I endured my first camping trip. We pitched our tents late and awoke the next day to realize the campsite was covered in wild hare shit. Then came the thunderstorms all night and the goons at the next site over. Did I mention it was black fly season? Yeah, black flies fed by what was in those big jugs on the next island over. I had fun. Wright's Island was the hub for all the boats. That's where I picked up the boat out to the biggest island, Peddock's. I read a book on the deck under the late afternoon sun while we rode out. We camped next to the vestiges of an assylum. Long Island is tethered to the mainland with a narrow bridge and sports a huge shelter on the end. Prime real estate occupied by homeless alcoholics. It all comes closer quickly and we're wheels down in Boston. Welcome back to the place that never was home. At least now I have a reason to feel like an interloper.

It's time to visit friends, for passover, for mending some rough edges I left behind.

The place has changed, as places do. I feel like I know where I am and in the next second I'm lost. Easy to forget that I'm not really seeing it with the same eyes. Eleven years I lived here. I walked through this park, passed this bench right here, wondering when life would change. When would life get better or more interesting? Over there I stumbled over the frozen pond, very drunk, and smashed that night's bottle of JD on the ice. My friends had to drag me away from the dissipating liquid and glass chards. This city was imprinted on my mind. I've flown through here in dreams. And now, warm spring day in the sun, none of those memories steps forward to aid in recognition. I see glass and steel, instead.


Day 2
Of all the years I was here I never once rode the Minute Man trail. My hosts poot me out of the door armed with a cycle and a helmet. It takes me a few false starts to get used to the brakes but I'm rolling pretty soon. Brooks! Trees! Maybe I never properly gave Mass a chance?

I meet up with a woman I knew to be fierce and direct. It's a bit puzzling how, for the first 30 minutes, we can't seem to get our bodies to be in the same coffee shop despite plans and cell phone usage. I know what I have to say but she heads me off at the pass by starting to apologize to me and explaining her bipolar behavior and manic cycles. I didn't even remember whatever she pulled!! Thank god she's on the mental mend now. I look in her eyes and there is still the strong woman I knew in there, but it's a crowded house. Something or someone else bleeds out the tiny cracks. Our 12 steps are the place where she comes back to herself and her dignity. Stepping out side that topic - things get mushy. Win, lady. Don't let this thing pull you under.

Passover
This old city is filled with monuments. There are monuments to ball players, historic oak trees and a past that wants to press forward, if only the monuments remember. There are other monuments I pass. There is the entry to the subway station where I fought with HIM. Well, was it a fight? Is it a fight if it only takes one line to win? This corner I used to wait for the 66 bus during my first summer here. I'd head off through Allston to that job where I went around asking for money for the environment. I bump into myself all over Harvard Square. It's a shifting homage to the bookstore that used to be on that corner and the craft store that remains. I'm amazed at what manages to stay and what has melted away. The bead store is still there. BEADS? But my bookstore? Gone. Comic book store? still there. Anime video store? Gone. Dang. There's new construction all around. Some of it is glass and steel and an improvement. Some of it is oppressive artifacts of bad planning and greed.

Tonight I observe a celebration of freedom. After a day of wandering and getting lost in memory lane's twists and turns, my freedom is in realizing that the vague recollections fashioned around a place are just fiction. They reflect back only bits I repeat in my head and glue together with imagination. None of it needs to be real. It's just another sunny day and I'm free from feeling anything more about it.

Number nine
I just did the only thing that I have yet done to help any soldier.

On the silver line out to the airport I was reflecting on the meeting I had just finished with the last Boston amend. The one with THAT guy. Everyone has a THAT guy - that toxic relationship that, once inside you don't know how you got in and you can't get out because the person you thought was your lover has just taken your sanity as hostage. It was that relationship that I would have chewed a limb off to extricate myself from. HIM. Him who has not learned a single new trick in the past 3 years and will proceed to pull the same shit. "Call me at 10 am and we'll make plans". I call at 10:05. I get voicemail. GAAAHH! He's doing it again! Breathe, shut up, and focus on your own shit.

Something about him stiffens me up. I'm like a snail afraid of getting salted or the sun afraid of a cloud should I have the temerity to pop over the horizon. I just can't seem to talk. I say what I came to and listen. In an hour and a half he did not once ask about me. In an hour and a half I talked for maybe 10 minutes. I listen to his ego fest, how great his work is, how great his wife is. I bite my tongue and let him give me relationship advice.

I roll the encounter around in my head like a marble while the bus pulls out of south station. Next to me a boy with a buzz cut is busy on his cell phone.

"Baby hold on, major's on the other line.... Yessir! Yessir I'm on the bus to the airport and I'm coming in tonight. I'll see you at roll tommorrow....Sorry baby. Yes. I'll be back I promise. I PROMISE!!" But he's crying and incomprehensible.

We go under the bay and he loses signal. "Baby? Sugar? Honey?" the sobbing voice pleads into the dark. I know I have a pack of tissues in my purse. I retrieve one and park it on his lap. Grabbing it he aims for the corners of his eyes. At his terminal he turns to tell me he's going back to "work" after 4 days leave. He's going back to war. I want to grab him and hug him like a mother would and say that he'll be ok. But I just don't know that. How many mothers wish their love was a guarantee against harm? I just waive bye bye at terminal B.