Currents

Soft, crunching sounds issued beneath my boots as I walked to the edge of the river. From a hundred yards away came the steady exhale of the falls, white noise buffered by the snowpack on the ground and trees. Vermont. A river and a covered bridge. Snow-laced trees imprinted against a morning sky pitched a …

Revealed

It’s easy to hate on Boston’s City Hall and the surrounding City Hall Plaza pavilion. City Hall anchors the expansive, unremarkable red brick courtyard wedged into a part of the city above the historic Faneuil Hall marketplace and shopping enclave. Aside from the occasional music fest or when the circus literally comes to town, the …

In The Picture

“You cut the heads off,” my father says to my mother. He takes the slim, black Kodack camera out of her hands. At the time, the camera was considered a “pocket” model, despite it being about the size of a pencil box. It had a wheel on the back you’d thumb to advance the film. …

Choose ‘in

The city feels like it belongs to me on Sunday mornings. Brunch lines are not much more than a suggestion outside of tiny, hip farm-to-table breakfast spots. Neighborhoods appear emptied out, the inhale before the rest of the day is expelled. The T is sleepy still, lumbering through Boston’s ancient tunnels like a primordial beast. …

Clarity in Uncertainty

The wind blew the fog in off the lake in thick sheets. In what seemed like only a few minutes on the running trail, the early morning sun and blue skies abandoned me to a curtain of mist. It reminded me of driving in winter weather coming up against nasty pockets of snow and sleet, …

Burnin For You

Each envelope was like getting a singular piece of plunder from a pirate’s chest. Inside, a CD of live music, booted and burned from a concert at some exotic sounding venue like The Grotto, The M-Stop, or The Gem Theater. Christmas in your mailbox. Before music was uploaded into our consciousness or etched onto a …

Left Turn Life

Walter could have been a painter. His father was a fairly well-known painter in Philadelphia. Walter studied painting at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He traveled in Europe, draining Italy of its inspiration. A style that started out as representational morphed into abstraction. In Italy he worked with an unusual technique involving …

When We Stood Still

My brother is the space nerd in the family. Months in advance of our one family trip to the mecca of all family vacation places—Disney World: where dreams come true!—he puts in his request to visit the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. This is his boy version of getting pulled up on stage …

The Fuller Cup

The two cafes faced each other like wild west gunslingers: The Fuller Cup and Starbucks. Scarcely twenty paces from one another, the cafes occupied space on a side street just off the main square of Winchester—a quaint, affluent town less than ten miles from Boston. The tiny downtown section unspools in a series of rotaries …

Let Go or Be Dragged

At first glance I thought it was a cricket. Its small, black body had that unmistakable exo-shine like the glossy sheen of a polished boot or Ronald Reagan’s hair. It looked about the right size and I could see two wings protruding from its sides. Then I noticed the antennae, the elongated torso, the thready …