Couple of Coffees

Seeing and being seen in Boston

We’ll just have to come back. That’s what I keep thinking about Boston. We barely scratched the surface of all the sights there, and yet we explored hardcore for two days.

We spent our first night in Massachusetts with my father's longtime friend Bobb a couple nights ago, and enjoyed visiting with him and eating his special blueberry waffles the next morning. Then we headed into the Boston area to meet up with my college friend Heather. She showed us around Cambridge, Brookline and fun coffee shops and a knitting store along the way. At Algiers in Harvard Square, I had a refreshing iced Viennese coffee with whipped cream and lots of cinnamon. We'd go there a lot if we lived nearby. We ate a delicious Mexican food dinner that evening with Heather and her mom.

Some days, all I want to write about is food. Both mornings we had Carberry's coffee and pastries, from the location near Heather's house. The pain au chocolat was so tasty the first morning, I got it the next day too. For dinner our second night there, Jonathan and I took off for Not Your Average Joe's, which was in walking distance from Heather and Rogelio's house. We sat at the bar, since there was a bit of a wait for a table. We learned from our waitress Mary that Arlington doesn't allow people to sit and drink (at least in public). A person can only order one drink if they're not ordering any food. If they choose to eat, they can order more drinks. It was fun to sit there, watch a Boston Red Sox game and hang out with locals.

Back to the sightseeing. July 3 was a step back in time for us. We jaunted off to Lexington and Concord, where the American Revolution started. We saw the town green in Lexington where the "shot heard 'round the world" was fired. The Museum of Our National Heritage had some great exhibits, including one detailed section on liberty and its meaning in America. It was the perfect way to celebrate the day before the Fourth.

The Battle of Concord, immortalized in a poem by Longfellow, was fought at the Old North Bridge in, of course, Concord. We stopped there to visit with Bill, one of the musicians in Independence Jazz Reunion, the band I wrote about back in 2000-01. We sat by the river, listening to the people pass by, catching up and admiring the blue heron that landed nearby.

We also stopped by Louisa May Alcott's house and also tried to check out Walden Pond. The pond, to our astonishment, was closed! Turns out it's so popular as a swimming destination, the parking lots were jammed, so the park authorities closed it until 4:30 p.m. We didn't wait around those hours to see it. The atmosphere didn't seem quite the way Thoreau experienced it, anyway. Instead we headed back to Boston, took the T to Davis Square, where we tested the caffeinated fuel at the Diesel coffee shop. Then we got back on public transportation to downtown and wandered around Boston Common and the public gardens where the swan boats are. We wandered past the Frog Pond on the way back, where giggling children were splashing, wading and floating in the communal water. I almost stripped off my shoes, rolled up my pants and joined them.

That was a long day, full of history, learning and eating good food. For as much as we've seen and experienced, though, the best days have been those when we've had wonderful, long conversations with old friends. Those days are filling our minds and hearts with nourishment. Much needed nourishment, in fact, in between all these road miles and the feeling of floating out in the world, untethered to responsibility and sometimes overstimulated by the number of choices and routes we have to pick every day. Any one different decision, and we'd be having a different road trip.

posted by Laura the Writer @ 9:37 PM