Another sunny and warm 70 degree day!
Today, something reminded me of the time I lived in Boston. I want to talk about it a little, so that my children can read it and shake their heads.
I started at Boston University soon after my late wife, Elaine, and I got married. We wanted to live in Boston so that I would not have to make a 120 mile commute every day. Helped by an office in the college, we investigated a lot of places. Most places were either dumps or much too expensive for my G.I. Bill payments. But then, we found a nice place right across from the college.. it was like a rooming house for couples, where the husband went to school, and the wife stayed home.
The woman who ran it said she was a relative of the Hawaiian Dole Pineapple empire. In fact, there were framed pictures of pineapple trees throughout the house. Mrs. "Dole" took an instant liking to Elaine, and offered us a wonderful boarding house deal. We were relaxed about it until Mrs. "Dole" said to Elaine: "Now, your turns as "mother' will be Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then you will be able to take care of all the 'tea-time' activity. We'll have a lovely time."
Wait a minute... Elaine wanted no part in any "tea party mother" stuff, and so we left what I thought would have been a great opportunity. The way that Mrs. "Dole" gushed over Elaine, and based on her advanced age, she probably would have "croaked" sometime soon and left her a nice inheritance. But Elaine didn't want to play that game, so we went off to look some more.
It was now getting dark and we only had one place left to inspect. It was a big brownstone on Dudley Street in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston. The landlord had a beautiful apartment, which contained a grand piano that he played for us. He was a professional musician, so how could we go wrong?
The back room apartment we rented was not fancy, but all right. Because of the darkness, we could not see out of any of the windows to see what the backyard looked like. I mean... how could it be anything but neat, like our landlord's apartment?
Were we in for a surprise when we woke up the next morning. Looking out the window, we were rewarded with a view of garbage piled up everywhere, with narrow lanes carved out so that humans and rats could find their way about. I must admit, though, that the small area in back of our apartment was shoveled out a bit, more than others, but still not much. Alas.. it was too late to back out. We had to live with keeping the windows closed and the shades down.
Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, Elaine's father decided to come visit us. We tried real hard to keep him from looking outside... but near the end of his visit he sneaked a peek... his reaction was:
"Jesus Christ!" He tried to get us to leave, but we decided to stick it out, at least for one semester.
Every weekday I would take a bus, an elevated and a subway to get to Boston University. The first day on the train platform, a woman suddenly grabbed me and shouted: "I've found you, Mr. Mystery!" When I said that I wasn't that man, she went away. However, such an encounter happened twice again before I reached the school. What the hell was going on?
It finally dawned on me.. a Boston radio station was having a contest. "Find Mr. Mystery and win $50, " and I was wearing a suit and tie and looking at the world through designer sunglasses. I had won these glasses in a blackjack game when I was stationed in Germany. I won them from Willy, whose home used to be Baltimore incidentally. I caught Willy cheating by making fingernail marks in all of the low cards. Apparently nobody else noticed. So, playing his own game against him, I took all of his money and in a last-ditch effort, he put up his favorite expensive sun glasses. Yes, I took him to the cleaners, so to speak. (He was not very happy about this and did try to kill me a little later, but that's another story.)
Once I stopped wearing the sunglasses, nobody took any notice of me.
Meanwhile, while we were living in the Boston area, we didn't need to drive our car, so we parked it on a side street and kind of forgot about it, until a couple of weeks later we learned that Elaine's grandmother had died and we needed to drive to New Bedford to attend the funeral.
I went to where we had parked our car. It was gone. Somebody had stolen it! When I reported it to the police, they told me that it wasn't stolen. It was impounded because in Boston, nobody can allow their car to be parked in one place for more that 48 hours. We were told that we could come to the impound lot, pay the fine and fees and get our car back. We used some of our small amount of cash to take a cab to the lot where an old red-faced Boston Irish cop said we had to pay something like $100. We did not have it. So, he said that they would keep it for a while. There would be additional fees added each day. Elaine started to cry.
Elaine's crying broke this old Irish cop's heart and he relented and said that we could take our car if we promised to pay the bill when we came back to Boston. We were glad for this kindness and Elaine decided to leave her watch with him as forfeit. We later came back, paid our bill and got Elaine's watch back.
Once we had our car back from the impound lot, we traveled to New Bedford for the sad funeral. Elaine's Memere was a very nice lady who spoke French, except when I was with her, when she used broken-English. We loved her and were very sad. I was allowed to be one of the pall-bearers at the funeral which was held in the largest and most beautiful French-Canadian catholic church in South-Eastern Massachusetts.
During the beautiful service and mass, the young priest spent a lot of time with the censer wafting perfumed air over the casket... but, he also spent some time next to where I was sitting on the aisle... I had showered that morning, so I know that it wasn't my smell that he was trying to cover up... it must be... could it be?
He must have known I wasn't catholic!
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