Things You See in Boston While Unemployed

6/29/2002

Another week of aimlessness has passed, and I have to admit the non-productivity is starting to wear on me just a little. Monday I went down near Haymarket and applied for unemployment benefits. The building was beautiful – a brown poured concrete job from the late 70’s or early 80’s that made you feel as if the walkways were dried creek beds, smooth and curving, with the steps very wide and shallow in round lines. Even the government assistance places are nice here in Boston. After jumping through the necessary hoops to get benefits, I sat in the shade of downtown crossing and ate some zucchini bread for lunch, and then walked all the way from downtown to the Hynes Convention center, as slowly as possible.

Downtown crossing is where I go when I really feel the need to “get some city”. The buildings are too tall to bother looking for the tops, and the streets are always crowded with workers and shoppers. There are jewelry shops and street vendors and tourists. The Boston Globe has its own store, and right now they’re selling a book that collects the investigative journalism surrounding the church scandal. There are so many more people than cars in downtown crossing that the cars sometimes just get flooded by pedestrians and can’t move.

Then I walked up Winter Street to the Boston Common, and it was a beautiful day to be young and free in the park. There were people everywhere spread out in the park eating lunch, flirting, getting sun. There were so many single young women reading that I gave up trying to count them. There were a great number of teens free from High School as well, and you could just tell they were having the time of their lives. There were also a number of homeless people mixed in with all this, some of them drinking, but mostly just laying around like everybody else, grateful for the good weather. The sun was out but it wasn’t too hot, and the Common was green and bright and beautiful.

I crossed from the Common into the Public Garden, and stood on the bridge over the pond for a good ten minutes, watching a swan. Swans are twice as large as Canadian Geese, and their necks are so long it doesn’t seem possible that their head could actually be held up by such a device. There are many more small children in the Public Garden than in the Common. Not all the fountains in the Public Garden were on that day; the two by the exit were off and dry for some reason.

I walked then down Commonwealth Avenue for a while. In this part of town Comm. Ave. has a park running down the middle of it, a greenway with tall trees and benches and statues in it. I paused and sat on a bench for a while in a section where there were more single women reading books. None of us spoke to each other, but they were only concentrated, each of them separately, on their reading. We were like the grove of Women Who Read Alone. It was one of those surreal moments that seems staged and false, but I felt lucky to have stumbled into it. A few hundred feet from the benches where women were reading alone, another woman, homeless and dirty, was sleeping on a blanket in the grass.

I crossed over from Commonwealth to Newbury on Exeter Street. The First Spiritual Temple, the birthplace of a religion debunked 100 years ago, is there. There’s a TGI Friday’s in the basement of the First Spiritual Temple. I went up Newbury Street pausing only to sell a few Cd’s I don’t care about anymore, and rode the T from Hynes Convention Center back to my apartment.

And nothing much happened for the rest of the week. Aral and I cooked, and watched TV, and I went to the library for books in Cambridge. Friday I went and visited Jack and Josh at the Medical Library, and that was just about it, except for the mostly naked guy.

On the way back from the medical library, I saw a man in a long black overcoat, and the long slit up the back revealed that he was only wearing his tighty-whities underneath. This older guy was over at Coolidge Corner, just sort of milling around in his big coat with nothing much on under it. Josh supposed this was because of the heat. I supposed it was because the naked guy was just creepy.

At my apartment in Allston, my cat has come up with his own way of dealing with summer. Mr. Puck trained Aral to give him ice cubes in his water bowl. Every time she goes in the kitchen, he meows at her loudly until she gives in, and then he licks the ice cube until his tongue goes numb. Then my cat sort of runs around with his tongue sticking out. He seems to have channeled exactly how I feel about life right now. Yea ice cubes.