Coffee Mug Full of Heroes and My Daily Commute

5/5/2002,version 2

I’ve noticed a drift in my entries over the past few months. They’ve tended to be more descriptive of me than of Boston. So let’s get back to basics, shall we?

I ride the 66 bus into work most mornings, and walk home. If the day is particularly nice, I’ll walk both ways. The 66 takes me from my Allston neighborhood to Harvard Square in about 20 minutes, and is filled mostly with women between the ages of 19 and 29. We all appear to be working class or students. Last week I made a note to myself to count the men and women on the bus, and in the mornings it tends to be about 4 women for every 1 guy. Sometimes it’s a higher ratio, but rarely a lower one. There are many more men who ride the bus in the afternoon commute, and I can only assume that they’re students.

I recognize the faces of my daily bus companions now. There are three girls who I run into most often – a short blonde with curly hair and an upturned nose, who only rides on alternate days; a girl with a dark short perm who wears skirts and who has been working her way through the Harry Potter series; and a girl with a frame similar to mine wears a dyed red ponytail and a trench coat and drowns the world out with her headphones every morning.

The buses during rush hour come about every five minutes, and I love them the way someone who grew up without public transportation can. It’s only 75 cents to ride if you haven’t got a pass. The buses that go into Harvard Square actually drive through a tunnel underground so that you can come up through the T station. Sometimes I get off a stop in advance though so I can walk through Harvard Square and people watch or look in store windows.

When I run though the University campus on my way into the library, I often see things I don’t expect, like performance art or protests for a cause. One of the most startling things was the day the groundskeepers overturned a lot of earth to plant things – I was so happy to smell and see dark soil after so long here in the city – but then spray painted the upturned earth green so the lawn wouldn’t look disturbed.

Weird. The green spray paint made the lawn look more disturbed than dark earth would have. It was really unnatural looking.

On my way home from work the other day, I passed by a coffee mug 3 and a half feet high. Because there appeared to be a small man struggling to climb over the coffee mug’s rim, I looked down and was only mildly surprised to find out that this man was the X-men’s Wolverine.

Well, an action figure of him, anyway. Down at the bottom of the coffee mug were a bunch of other superhero figurines, all struggling to climb out of the giant coffee mug. There was a big display of student art finals, and the hero mug was only one of many. There’s also currently a giant red gerbil wheel big enough for people to fit inside, and a shrine to milk, and a bunch of sticks tied together hanging from a tree nearby. These things, like bridges made of turf and stumps eulogizing lost forests remind me why I love living here. No one thinks to really question if a coffee mug for the Green Giant filled with comic book action figures is art. Of course it’s art. It has a label, doesn’t it?

My walk home is increasingly pleasant as the weather gets nicer. I walk through Harvard Square, past the shops and brick streets, over the memorial bridge. There’s a beautiful view there of the manicured JFK park and the tamed, hyper-civilized Charles River. It’s hard for me to cross that bridge and look at all the carefully clipped grass and not think about the Savannah River, where the thick underbrush pushes right up to the red clay banks, full of tangled roots and snakes. Yet people swim in the dangerous dirty wild Savannah, and no one would dream of riding a rope swing out over the Charles, jumping in full of beers with a big yell and splash.

After I cross the bridge I’m in my Boston neighborhood of Allston, but still on Harvard owned land. There are dorms and a big recreation center and a fabulous old stadium. I cross a big intersection after a public school and I’m in what would be my neighborhood if the interstate hadn’t cut it in half decades ago. The Allston Public Library is here, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, but I have to cross a huge ugly overpass that’s loud and unpleasant to get to the streets close to my home. The overpass gives me a nice look at the downtown Boston skyline though, and sometime I stop and just lean on the chain-link fence for a minute and think about how beautiful it is. Once I’m within a few blocks of my house, my mind sort of starts to let go of my workday, and that’s a good thing. It takes about 50 minutes on foot at a mosey sort of pace to get from my work to my front door.

I've been really down about a lot of big things lately - the state of the world and the country, my inability to choose between Boston and Atlanta, the idea of what my life would be like after grad school and the reality of what it really is. So I've been trying to make a point of enjoying all the little things, like the bus and the view of Boston from the overpass bridge. If I can remember what an everyday miricle it is to see a coffee mug full of heroes on my daily commute through one of my favorite places in the world, I feel a lot better. Yay Art.