“They shall be a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” John Winthrop (1588–1649), First Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in his sermon A Model of Christian Charity (1630), imagining Boston even before his feet ever touched American soil.
My friend Sandra joined my son Jukie and me for a long walk around Boston last Thursday. I hadn’t seen my high school and college classmate for decades, so I appreciated the chance to share stories while exploring the city on foot.
We started our walk at the New England Aquarium, meandering through the Rose Kennedy Greenway with its fountains, public art, and a carousel that so intrigued Jukie. Then we lunched at Tia’s Waterfront Restaurant before picking up part of the Freedom Trail past the Copps Hill Burying Ground, where my 5th cousin by marriage, the onetime Harvard College president Increase Mather, is buried. With the help of the website FamilySearch, we found many ancestors.
Then we walked past the Old North Church (one if by land, etc.), through the North End and then Beacon Hill until we finally made it back to Boston Common, the oldest public park in America, and the Boston Garden, where Robin Williams’ Sean Maguire sat on a park bench with Matt Damon’s Will Hunting.
My oldest and youngest kids were at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, so I proposed to Sandra that she accompany Jukie and me as we walk all the way there, even though we had been walking all day. She had the day (Juneteenth) off, and I suspect that she was enjoying catching up on all our old friends as much as I was, so that walk continued. We took the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, the shaded and tree-lined green axis of Boston’s Back Bay, the two miles all the way to Massachusetts Avenue.
As we walked, certain truths about Boston, and about myself, began to emerge.” I categorized them in my head so I could remember them for you here:
- I did not know Boston as well as I thought I did, even though I spent almost four years there as an undergraduate. During my week in Beantown, our adventuresome navigator, my son Truman, introduced me to parts of the city that he had dutifully researched, and that I had not bothered to investigate when I lived there. For example, I relished (I almost said “revered”) the peaceful and shaded courtyard at the Paul Revere Mall. By contrast, when I was an BU undergraduate, I had my head in the books of my ever-growing library and my heart divided between my many Boston friends and the “beautiful London roommate” (as I kept describing Kate to anyone who would listen) who would later become my bride.
- Boston wears its history on its sleeve. As I reflected upon last week, everywhere you go, you find a plaque or a statue reminding you who slept where or who walked that same thoroughfare. We saw six buildings where Ralph Waldo Emerson had spent some time, mostly talking to skeptics about abolitionism. At almost 200 years, the median age of buildings in the Beacon Street neighborhood is older than the state of California. Yesterday on the Black Heritage Trail we stopped by 66 Phillips Street, the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House (settled by them in 1846) that was Boston’s most active safe house for escaped enslaved Africans and African Americans. For many, it was the last stop on the Underground Railroad.
- My companions and I took advantage of Boston’s walkability. Judged the third most walkable city in America (just behind New York City and San Francisco), Boston is tightly packed around neighborhoods that once benefitted from everyone walking who wasn’t riding a horse (or today, a bike). The numbers tell the story my feet already knew: Boston has 930 parks covering 17% of the city, which means that all residents live near a park. As was true for most of the time that I lived in Washington D.C. and Boston, 33.8% of Boston households have no car, compared to a 2016 national average of 8.7%. The MBTA and my shoes took me everywhere I wanted to go. Such a city empowers the walker and offers freedom to the carless.
- Jukie and I spent almost ten hours walking on Juneteenth, interrupted often for meals, chats with my friend Sandra, and sightseeing. Because he and I spend so much of our time walking (averaging over ten miles a day on weekends), he is a hearty traveling companion in cities as walkable as Boston. I get to fly east rarely (my last trip was in 2019), partly because Jukie’s disabilities and OCD can make him such a handful. If this trip is any indication, his training as a walker may make my perpetual companion particularly well-suited for walks in European cities. Someday!
- The aforementioned parks allow meandering Bostonians and visitors to dwell in oases of wooded reverie that, to me, are just as inspirational as Winthrop’s imagined City upon a Hill. Walking with Jukie on busy city streets is anxiety-provoking, while stepping into one of Boston’s many parks, or the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, provides a respite from all that hubbub, traffic, and noise. As Wordsworth says in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.”
- I write to you around the time of the Summer Solstice, the longest days of the year, the very heart of summer. When I regard The Saint Francis of Assisi Garden next to the Old North Church; the 200-year-old Shaw Memorial Elms located near the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on the Boston Common, or even the aforementioned Commonwealth Avenue Mall, I wondered aloud why I never studied or wrote academic papers in such transcendent locations. Then I remember that as a college student I only spent the whole of one month a year in Boston, October, when the high temperature was over 60 degrees. I read all those books in Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library in part because it was too cold to read outside. Summer in Boston is glorious and atypical, and now the home to new memories. Memories reshape places.
After Sandra, Jukie, and I walked all the way to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where my daughter Geneva and son Truman had spent the entire day, I got to introduce my kids to a friend whom I had made in ninth grade at The Field School, who I helped to get a job at the Tenley Circle Theatre in 1984, and who was a Boston University classmate for four years. As I listened to Geneva and Sandra compare food allergies, and as I took in that Truman and Sandra’s son Henry will be focusing on film and writing in college, I smiled at the connections that rewarded us much more than the impressive step count. I also realized that had spent more time with Sandra than with most of my other friends, and then I spent more years away from Boston and from good friends like Sandra than I should have.
As we rode the Green Line train back towards our hotel, I knew that Sandra had to exit one stop before us, at Park Street, to transfer to the Red Line and home to her family in Quincy. Having so enjoyed our day together, I wanted to stop time, or at least stop the train, and cover all the topics and people whom we might have missed. Even a full day of walking and laughter with a lifetime friend feels too short.
I miss my friend Sandra, but I realized that day that I also miss those unfinished versions of ourselves that were raw, ridiculous, and gloriously unaware of what we didn’t yet know when we hung out together on high school trips, at senior prom, or at the movies we watched together as college students.
I was both naive and book-zealous when I lived in Boston, and I didn’t mind that I was merely stumbling eagerly through life, asking every person and book Allen Ginsberg’s famous question: Are you my angel? It feels strange to say so, but I loved the incomplete, unreflective, and academically obsessive person I was back then when I walked the frozen streets of that city on a hill. As I have been bittersweetly remembering this week, I was so full of possibilities, so full of hope.
Late June is upon us — how lucky we are to live in Davis! I invite you to join the regulars and the first-timers outside at Sudwerk tonight, perhaps in the shade, for a grand competition. On such days, I especially love hosting an outdoor Pub Quiz at sunset as we all get to enjoy the cooling temperatures together. Others feel the same way, for we had almost 35 teams compete last week. We will have a substitute quizmaster tonight in Toby. Give him your patience and attention!
Speaking of the weather, here in New York, we’ve been instructed to stay indoors because the temperature is approaching what we enjoy every summer in Davis. Today we will see more waterfalls and Ithaca College and then dine at the Moosewood Restaurant. My mom cooked many recipes from the Moosewood Cookbook soon after I became a vegetarian in 1981.
In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: explosions, eastern Europe, helpful animals, Oscars, good leaders, champions, foxes, inventors, countries of origin, obscurity expeditions, personal income taxes, historical commissions, romantic confusion, social media personalities who change their names, the examples of brothers, dramatic home runs, missed games, intense greenhouse effects, journals, Romans, jokers, narrators, significant leads, charmers, migrations south, drummers, alternatives to Philadelphia, women’s shoes, astronomy, memories, bells, U.S. cities, geography, current events, and Shakespeare.
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Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. We have over 70 Patreon members now, including the new paid subscribers Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens, whose players or substitutes keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks in particular to Ellen and to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Find here three questions on Katherine Hepburn!
- Katharine Hepburn was born in a state that shares a name with the longest river in New England. Coincidentally, Dr. Andy drove across this river on June 24th. Name the state.
- Katharine Hepburn holds the record for the most Academy Awards by a theatrical performer, at four, winning those Oscars in three different decades. Name just one of those decades.
- What actor was Katharine Hepburn’s romantic and professional partner in nine films?