On Thursday I took the Red Line T
(subway) to the Charles/MGH stop, walked past Massachusetts General Hospital,
along Cambridge St., then Tremont St. to the far side of the Boston Common. I
walked through the Common, among the trees with their August-dark green leaves,
passing Frog Pond, full of squealing young children and smiling parents splashing
in the giant public wading pool.
Crossing at Beacon St., I trudged up Beacon Hill, passing MGH
again. I wasn’t ready to give up walking and take the T, so I crossed the
Charles River at the Longfellow Bridge to walk along the river in Cambridge.
Across from Boston University is a small exercise park, the
kind with exercise stations: horizontal poles for pull-ups and slanted benches
for abdominal crunches. A few bare-chested young men were exercising in the hot
sun and I relived the muscular hug my Army medic with close-cropped hair and khakis
gave me when we met at R’els Christmas concert just twenty months ago.
I planned to walk all
the way to Alewife, over four miles from the Longfellow Bridge, but with two
and a half miles remaining I became disheartened near Central Square and bailed
at Harvard Square. Back at Alewife, I realized I’d left my ticket in my car on
level five, the rooftop of the parking garage. I eschewed the escalators, climbed
the five parking-garage-sized levels to the car, went back down to the kiosk,
and up again to the car before driving to Market Basket, my favorite grocery
store in the world (available only in Massachusetts and New Hampshire).
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