Dirty Water (Part Three)

Some last notes on our trip east. I've decided to not call it a vacation, which to my mind involves sleeping in, a little shopping, some leisurely dinners at nice restaurants... Travelling with twin 2.5 year olds did not allow for much vacationing.

If you are considering taking a cab from Revere to the far edge of Cambridge, it may be cheaper to rent a car. While I remember cab rides from my Sommerville/Cambridge/Charlestown apartments being both fast and relatively cheap, the Airport-to-Alewife route apparently falls into the realm of "Cahnt get theare from heare."

Despite liking pudding, rice, and raisins, the boys did not care for the kheer -- rice pudding with raisins -- at the Bombay Club.

We received so many books and toys -- from Elissa, from Suzanne, from Courtney and Deb, from an unguarded stroll through the cart vendors in Fanueil Hall -- that we worried about incurring a fee for overweight luggage on the way home. Our largest bag weighed in at 50.5 lbs, avoiding the fee only by the sour grace of the airline staff. (Subject for another post: this trend of offloading fees and "penalties" such as this one, as if it actually requires extra fuel to transport a bag that exceeds 50 lbs. Should we then get rebates if a trips passengers come in underweight? Or will air travellers soon have to pay by the pound?)

At Cheryl and Tom's Shindig, Caleb picked up a hotdog as if it were a cob of corn, took one bite out of its middle, and returned it to the platter. As Cheryl said, "I've never seen anyone eat a hot dog like that before!"

That cookout was a perfect bookend. Other than Jason, who'd left earlier in the week, and a couple of other notable exceptions, it involved almost everyone I was friends with in graduate school who are still in the Boston area. Ted and Geeta and their kids, who were quite small when last I'd seen them and are now capable babysitters, were fun to see, as were Andrew, Clare, Chris and Lisa, Tim and Suzanne, Cheryl and Tom. We went to a nearby park, with a sprinkler pad for the kids, built -- according to either Ted or Tim, atop a former Cambridge town dump. You miss these things about Cambridge. We all sat on the rocks there and watched the kids, all of us ten years older than when we last would have reasonably all sat together, and the sky was a certain amount blue and a certain amount cloudy, and all of our kids mingled together and with other kids there, African-American and Latin American and Chinese-American and Indian-American all combining together within and without these kids, all creating the kind of moment that you want to bottle somehow, to capture, and yet the camera has disappeared somewhere and so you make a concerted effort to live in the moment, and then someone's dressing the children again, and Chris and Lisa are leaving to play a show in Western Mass, and already the moment is breaking up, separating into little particles that drift outward and away from each other like the water jetting from a sprinkler...

Sam, once fully dried and dressed, made broke away -- maybe just as eager as I to reclaim the lost time above -- and drenched himself. Cheryl loaned him a nice powder-blue pattern-printed blouce with the most darling pinched-up sleeves, and Sam wore that in the cab on the way back to the hotel.

And now we are home again, where the boys have pointed to the sky and said, plaintively, "choo-choo?"