Trip Recap, PT III: The Fun Part Begins
Even though I was going to be in town for about 10 days, somehow everything got scheduled for my first Saturday in town. It couldn't be helped. Boston is one of the few places in the country where there is a real blind sailing program. They have recreational sailing trips almost every Saturday morning, but since the following Saturday would be during the Fourth of July weekend that wouldn't be one of them, so the only time I could go was the 28th.
There were also a bunch of LJ people congregating in the area that weekend, dubbed Blinkfest, basically a bunch of "blind chicks with dogs" and I wanted to meet them (especially the ones who weren't local).
Third, my friend from college, Medge, had mentioned that he was planning to get tickets to see Richard Thompson at an outdoor concert that evening and did I want to go? Of course the answer was yes.
The thing was that the planning for all these things was kind of up in the air. I'd traded a few emails with someone at the blind-sailing program but had gotten no response to my final "I'm planning to be there on the 28, is there anything I should know before I show up?"
Similarly, I got an email from Medge on Friday saying that the outdoor venue might be rained out and he hadn't gotten tickets early enough for the alternative indoor venue.
And there would be all the logistics of getting from place to place the day after landing, in a city that I'm not completely unfamiliar with, but also don't have little maps in my head like I still do of parts of Manhattan.
This all was meant to be mitigated by arriving in Boston at 4 the previous afternoon, which would have afforded plenty of planning time. But thanks to the Chicago-based farce of the previous day, that was not to be.
My hostesseses, V, a good friend from high school, and her partner O (a research biologist from France), offer to drive me to the sailing thing, down "near the Navy Yad" (according to the older gentleman we got directions from.) When we arrived, to not much surprise at all, they had no idea who I was and didn't I know I needed to talk to this other person, and usually people don't bring their dogs with them, and you really should have talked to Person-I'd-Never-Heard-Of. But they found a place for me on a boat, and V & O were willing to go off and take Pepper for a walk around Cambridge, where, I'm told she endeared herself to many people.
The boat was a 19-ft boat that held 4 of us, only one of whom was sighted. For about half the trip I took the helm while the other guys (everyone else was male) handled the jibsheets and mainsail. We talked a lot as we cruised around Boston Harbor, passing well out of range of one of the tall ships where they were shooting canons as practice for some historical reenactment, and Tom, the sighted guy, shared his stories of sailing around Vancouver Island and his adventures in a bar in Victoria.
I was gratified when one of the more experienced sailors on the boat said I'd done a damn fine job, since I'd spent a good part of the beginning trying to remember which way I needed to move the tiller. (The boats I'd been learning on have tillers that turn the boat the same way you steer; traditional tillers work the opposite way.)
We returned to shore and V & O & P were waiting for me. And then it was time to find the Blinkfesters at Davis Square, from whence we would all take the T to go to Spy Pond, where the dogs could go play. With scrambled messages and directions, I finally made it, but with no little stress on many people's part, I fear.
But once we were all at the pond things were fun. Six women of various levels of blinkitude, and six dogs, of various levels of sociability! Pepper got to play and swim with other dogs. But I wanted to limit her in-water time, since (as of noon) the concert plans were on and I would have to bring her into somebody's car.
Pepper
was
not
happy
When I re-leashed her and pulled her away from the water she let loose with barks and whimpers of a pitch and tone that no dog her size should make. It sounded like I was torturing a puppy! And she would make these little jumps at each bark. It was all tooo much like a four-year-old shrieking "You! Are! A! Big! Meany! And! You! Won't! Let! Me! Swih-Ih-Ih-Iiiiiiiiiihm!" I am grateful to fiddle_pup for letting me use her towel to get Pepper somewhat dry. And I am glad that Pepper was in plain view of people walking along the nearby path, so they could see that this dog was not being tortured in the least. She was just being a big ol' brat.
With directions on retracing my steps on the Minuteman Bike Trail back to the Alewife T Station, Pepper and I headed off for our next rendezvous. Interestingly, once she was given something else to pay attention to, that whole incident of [not] being tortured left her mind completely. We cruised along the trail until I got nervous that we'd taken a wrong turn or overshot.
I tried the "I'm lost" thing again, which is a little trickier on a bike trail, since you have to hope for a pedestrian, since bikers and joggers are all going too fast to stop for directions. Luckily, just as the panic that has become familiar when in need of directions in Seattle was beginning to set in: ("I don't know where I am and I can't get anybody to stop* and I'm going to get lost and be late and why did I decide I could do this again?") somebody did stop and let me know that I was less than 100 yards from my destination.
Just as I approached the station my cell phone rang...
"Wave your arm."
I did so, shiny silver cell phone in hand no less. "I see you! We'll be right there."
I and an only moderately damp Pepperdog climbed in the car with Medge and a couple of his friends, and we headed to Lowell for the concert, which was very good, if chilled with the threat of rain.
I had several people approach me as we sat in the park, asking me about Pepper and telling what I've grown to refer to as their dead dog stories. One lost her golden retriever of 14 years the year before, one had what "could have been a champion bird hunter, but you couldn't train her to soft-mouth the birds. She'd keep killin' them." (you'll have to imagine the accent yourself; your basic no-nonsense New Englander) and one who said, "I don't care what anyone told you, that's a pure lab. Best dogs in the world." (Pepper is 3/4 lab, 1/4 golden.) Through all of these stories, I mouthe the appropriate responses. There's not much else you can do.
With Richard Thompson there's always the question of which song he will play that will catch you in the throat. One friend referred to him as open-a-vein music. I don't quite hear it that way. There are songs about loss and regret but, for me at least, they're never quite about abject despair. "King of Bohemia" and "Persuasion" came closest for me,, but during "Beeswing", one of our group, whose wife had recently passed away stepped away from the group, and came back to gain consolation from petting Pepperdog. Later, I offered him time to hang out with Pepper for "dog therapy" if he needed. After the fact, I asked Medge if that had been inappropriate, and he told me his friend had actually been quite touched by the offer.
I was dropped off back at V & O's near midnight. The next morning there had been plans for Blinkfesters (it's hard for me not to type Blinkfesterers, no offense those of you who are reading this) to meet for breakfast at Davis Square around 9:30-10, and then go to Lush. But upon waking at 8ish, I realized that after the previous two-days adventures, I wasn't quite up for navigating the Green line to the Red line -- figuring out stations and trains and meeting places -- so instead, V and I went to the De Cordova sculpture park in Lincoln (pictures in next post), where we made inappropriate comments about some of the art, and amused comments about other of it, and played in the gift shop with puppets and great little clockwork toys (which I resisted buying, because I was attempting to live out of a carry-on bag and a small backpack and buying unnecessary things worked against that intention. The T-shirt with the Mark Twain quote was necessary though. (The Thoreau quote might have been more geographically appropriate, but it was boring.))
Then Pepper got to paddle through the algae in Jamaica Pond (where she found a tennisball!) and we didn't quite manage to beat the thunderous downpour back to the car.)
The rest of the week was spent with me working (actually doing my job) from my friends' dining room table during the day. It was hard to get into the "I'm not on vacation" head-space for the first day, but it clicked back in, although recalculating time-zones for meeting scheduling was fun. I went to dinner with friends on a couple evenings. Seeing V's parents one night, meeting Medge and other of his friends for food and drink (including absinth!) in Harvard Square another.
TBC.
*It doesn't even always work to say excuse me! I don't no if people are plugged into their Ipods or just oblivious or what.
There were also a bunch of LJ people congregating in the area that weekend, dubbed Blinkfest, basically a bunch of "blind chicks with dogs" and I wanted to meet them (especially the ones who weren't local).
Third, my friend from college, Medge, had mentioned that he was planning to get tickets to see Richard Thompson at an outdoor concert that evening and did I want to go? Of course the answer was yes.
The thing was that the planning for all these things was kind of up in the air. I'd traded a few emails with someone at the blind-sailing program but had gotten no response to my final "I'm planning to be there on the 28, is there anything I should know before I show up?"
Similarly, I got an email from Medge on Friday saying that the outdoor venue might be rained out and he hadn't gotten tickets early enough for the alternative indoor venue.
And there would be all the logistics of getting from place to place the day after landing, in a city that I'm not completely unfamiliar with, but also don't have little maps in my head like I still do of parts of Manhattan.
This all was meant to be mitigated by arriving in Boston at 4 the previous afternoon, which would have afforded plenty of planning time. But thanks to the Chicago-based farce of the previous day, that was not to be.
My hostesseses, V, a good friend from high school, and her partner O (a research biologist from France), offer to drive me to the sailing thing, down "near the Navy Yad" (according to the older gentleman we got directions from.) When we arrived, to not much surprise at all, they had no idea who I was and didn't I know I needed to talk to this other person, and usually people don't bring their dogs with them, and you really should have talked to Person-I'd-Never-Heard-Of. But they found a place for me on a boat, and V & O were willing to go off and take Pepper for a walk around Cambridge, where, I'm told she endeared herself to many people.
The boat was a 19-ft boat that held 4 of us, only one of whom was sighted. For about half the trip I took the helm while the other guys (everyone else was male) handled the jibsheets and mainsail. We talked a lot as we cruised around Boston Harbor, passing well out of range of one of the tall ships where they were shooting canons as practice for some historical reenactment, and Tom, the sighted guy, shared his stories of sailing around Vancouver Island and his adventures in a bar in Victoria.
I was gratified when one of the more experienced sailors on the boat said I'd done a damn fine job, since I'd spent a good part of the beginning trying to remember which way I needed to move the tiller. (The boats I'd been learning on have tillers that turn the boat the same way you steer; traditional tillers work the opposite way.)
We returned to shore and V & O & P were waiting for me. And then it was time to find the Blinkfesters at Davis Square, from whence we would all take the T to go to Spy Pond, where the dogs could go play. With scrambled messages and directions, I finally made it, but with no little stress on many people's part, I fear.
But once we were all at the pond things were fun. Six women of various levels of blinkitude, and six dogs, of various levels of sociability! Pepper got to play and swim with other dogs. But I wanted to limit her in-water time, since (as of noon) the concert plans were on and I would have to bring her into somebody's car.
Pepper
was
not
happy
When I re-leashed her and pulled her away from the water she let loose with barks and whimpers of a pitch and tone that no dog her size should make. It sounded like I was torturing a puppy! And she would make these little jumps at each bark. It was all tooo much like a four-year-old shrieking "You! Are! A! Big! Meany! And! You! Won't! Let! Me! Swih-Ih-Ih-Iiiiiiiiiihm!" I am grateful to fiddle_pup for letting me use her towel to get Pepper somewhat dry. And I am glad that Pepper was in plain view of people walking along the nearby path, so they could see that this dog was not being tortured in the least. She was just being a big ol' brat.
With directions on retracing my steps on the Minuteman Bike Trail back to the Alewife T Station, Pepper and I headed off for our next rendezvous. Interestingly, once she was given something else to pay attention to, that whole incident of [not] being tortured left her mind completely. We cruised along the trail until I got nervous that we'd taken a wrong turn or overshot.
I tried the "I'm lost" thing again, which is a little trickier on a bike trail, since you have to hope for a pedestrian, since bikers and joggers are all going too fast to stop for directions. Luckily, just as the panic that has become familiar when in need of directions in Seattle was beginning to set in: ("I don't know where I am and I can't get anybody to stop* and I'm going to get lost and be late and why did I decide I could do this again?") somebody did stop and let me know that I was less than 100 yards from my destination.
Just as I approached the station my cell phone rang...
"Wave your arm."
I did so, shiny silver cell phone in hand no less. "I see you! We'll be right there."
I and an only moderately damp Pepperdog climbed in the car with Medge and a couple of his friends, and we headed to Lowell for the concert, which was very good, if chilled with the threat of rain.
I had several people approach me as we sat in the park, asking me about Pepper and telling what I've grown to refer to as their dead dog stories. One lost her golden retriever of 14 years the year before, one had what "could have been a champion bird hunter, but you couldn't train her to soft-mouth the birds. She'd keep killin' them." (you'll have to imagine the accent yourself; your basic no-nonsense New Englander) and one who said, "I don't care what anyone told you, that's a pure lab. Best dogs in the world." (Pepper is 3/4 lab, 1/4 golden.) Through all of these stories, I mouthe the appropriate responses. There's not much else you can do.
With Richard Thompson there's always the question of which song he will play that will catch you in the throat. One friend referred to him as open-a-vein music. I don't quite hear it that way. There are songs about loss and regret but, for me at least, they're never quite about abject despair. "King of Bohemia" and "Persuasion" came closest for me,, but during "Beeswing", one of our group, whose wife had recently passed away stepped away from the group, and came back to gain consolation from petting Pepperdog. Later, I offered him time to hang out with Pepper for "dog therapy" if he needed. After the fact, I asked Medge if that had been inappropriate, and he told me his friend had actually been quite touched by the offer.
I was dropped off back at V & O's near midnight. The next morning there had been plans for Blinkfesters (it's hard for me not to type Blinkfesterers, no offense those of you who are reading this) to meet for breakfast at Davis Square around 9:30-10, and then go to Lush. But upon waking at 8ish, I realized that after the previous two-days adventures, I wasn't quite up for navigating the Green line to the Red line -- figuring out stations and trains and meeting places -- so instead, V and I went to the De Cordova sculpture park in Lincoln (pictures in next post), where we made inappropriate comments about some of the art, and amused comments about other of it, and played in the gift shop with puppets and great little clockwork toys (which I resisted buying, because I was attempting to live out of a carry-on bag and a small backpack and buying unnecessary things worked against that intention. The T-shirt with the Mark Twain quote was necessary though. (The Thoreau quote might have been more geographically appropriate, but it was boring.))
Then Pepper got to paddle through the algae in Jamaica Pond (where she found a tennisball!) and we didn't quite manage to beat the thunderous downpour back to the car.)
The rest of the week was spent with me working (actually doing my job) from my friends' dining room table during the day. It was hard to get into the "I'm not on vacation" head-space for the first day, but it clicked back in, although recalculating time-zones for meeting scheduling was fun. I went to dinner with friends on a couple evenings. Seeing V's parents one night, meeting Medge and other of his friends for food and drink (including absinth!) in Harvard Square another.
TBC.
*It doesn't even always work to say excuse me! I don't no if people are plugged into their Ipods or just oblivious or what.