Mass. trip report: my natal family
Thursday, August 7th
Got out of bed, got started on getting rid of those US Savings Bonds. Went to the Federal Reserve’s website: you can’t sell back treasury bonds direct to the treasury! Googled for banks near Franklin MA. Bank of America sounds good. Called them up to ask how to get rid of large quantities of bonds when I don’t have an account at any bank in the commonwealth. They said I could just open an account with the bonds as the initial deposit. Well, it’s a plan, anyway.
[Aside: 25 years ago, when I was still working at Company ℳ (my original job title was “baby-sitter”; final job title “senior systems programmer”), the Bank of America was one of the customers for our securities-DBMS product. The joke around the office then was that Bank of America was one of our smallest customers, followed by Bank of New England and then Bank of New York. The customer’s actual size was inversely proportional to the geographic area they claimed to serve! Bank of New England later became BayBank, which bought up many area banks including the Newton-Waltham Bank where I had a "youth account". BayBank merged with the Bank of Boston and then with Fleet Bank (two more of our customers). It was later assimilated by the Bank of America (= "the Borg"). Meanwhile, the Bank of New York (which was America’s first bank, founded by Alexander Hamilton) got heavily into money-laundering and was bought out by Mellon. Bank of America was originally the North Carolina National Bank and is now the largest bank in the country. Resistance is futile! All this bank-merger activity is indicative (despite what this guy says) of robber-baron capitalism which does not serve the public interest. Oh noes! I’ve linked to a Communist Party website-the McCarthyites will get me!]
So we drove back to that same plaza with the Longhorn Steakhouse. At Bank of America we were told that there were only two employees, “Beth” and “Seth”, who could open the accounts for us, but they were both busy. So we waited. Wifey and the kidlets went back to Bath & Body Works for more vanilla stench-emitters. Still no Beth or Seth by the time they returned, so we waited some more. After half an hour, we celebrated American capitalism by rejecting BofA for poor service and going over to Strata Bank at the other end of the plaza. The bank manager there immediately led us into her office and formulated an action plan: we would cash ¼ of the bonds at Strata today, ¼ of the bonds at BofA today (avoiding the need to open an account there), then do the same thing again tomorrow for the other ½ of the bonds.
Both banks had little signs showing today’s date to help you fill out your forms. Both banks showed yesterday’s date on their signs. As far as I know, this is always wrong: bank dates must be either today or the next business day. Being surrounded by signs that were lying about the date seemed to bother Kid #1 rather a lot, so I told her about my experience as a baby-sitter for one of the founders of Company ℳ. In his house was a clock that chimed the hours. It always displayed the wrong time, so I fixed it whenever I went over there. Later it was always stopped, so I wound it during my visits. Eventually I found out that the founder and his wife hated the noise that the clock made-the wife was starting to think that a ghost was winding it up just to annoy her!
After converting the bonds to cash (non-customers can’t get bank cheques!), we went to Stop & Shop for yet more food, then to the sign “Franklin: Home of the Nation's First Public Library” to take pictures of Kid #1 holding a copy of Superior Saturday. She was supposed to be wearing her banned-books bracelet but it had been forgotten at the hotel room this morning. Finally we got to leave that plaza!
Then we drove to Arlington MA. Have I mentioned how sick I was getting of all this driving? Oh yeah, it was supposed to be mentioned in the entry for August 6th that I skipped. Anyway, our computer-generated route had us driving by the synogogue in Lexington where I had chanted my Bar Mitzvah, so I got off the highway and went to look at my childhood house nearby. It’s still about the same, except that it now has pink vinyl siding and the shrubs I remember have been restored (the next owners after my family had yanked them out). We also drove by my elementary school, which looks awful due to extensive grass infiltration of the asphalt ball courts, but apparently there are plans afoot to remodel the place.
In Arlington we visited Penzey’s Spice Shop, because they don’t deliver to Canada at a reasonable price. Wifey spent $65 on a year’s supply of spices, plus $5 for an ounce (that's a lot!) of dried chives for my aunt. Penzey’s has a “kids’ drawing area” where both of my kidlets drew OPEN signs and then taped them to the window. Sometimes "they're all together ooky", if you catch my drift.
Then we drove to my aunt’s house in Brookline. It was the usual chit-chat. My aunt used to travel a lot during her retirement, but recently she (like ozarque) has decided not to fly anymore. Apparently the problem is that she is a little old lady in a wheelchair, which is exactly the demographic that the TSA goons like to pick on. (I wouldn’t doubt that many of those creeps had tried the duct-tape-on-a-cat experiment when they were kids.) There was a bit of a disagreement over dinner, which had been scheduled to be home-delivered Chinese. Usually we buy dinner at her house and she buys for us when she flies to Philadelphia for a conference. But we don’t live near Philadelphia anymore. And we’re a little tight on funds right now. So my aunt bought the dinner.
Brookline is no longer the sleepy bedroom community for Boston that my aunt grew up in. The city has swallowed it now. After the USSR broke up, Brookline became a Mecca for successful Jewish immigrants from Russia and Israel, who continue to speak their native languages on its streets. After visiting my aunt, we went to a local Stop & Shop (which was originally a Jewish-owned supermarket chain). We bought traditional Kosher foods like pigs-in-a-blanket, crumbled Communion wafers, and some delicious US patent #3,108,882 which didn’t exist yet when I was born. Also purchased was some APS film and 3 more items for the Iraq care package.
Finally got back to our hotel room at 10 PM.
[Meanwhile, back in Canada, Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro took $122.71 out of my chequing account today to pay for the electricity used by our now-unoccupied house. I still don’t understand what the business situation was that induced Wilmot Hydro-and not the electric companies of the other six Waterloo County townships?-to merge with Kitchener, whose laconic corporate history page is just the history of Kitchener (née “Berlin”) with nothing about Wilmot.]