Dirty Water (Part Two)

Navigating the Boston subway system with a double stroller was not always easy. Most of the downtown stations are not wheelchair accessible -- which essentially means they had no elevators -- and the ones that were (like Park Street) had such narrow elevators that we couldn't fit the stroller through the doors. Several times we had to hoist the stroller, with the boys strapped in, and take them up or down a set of steps in order to get to where we needed to go. (Getting from the blue line to the red line was always precarious.) Once, a samaritan waited at the top of the stairs to help me carry the stroller down, which would instill some small faith in ones fellow man were it not for the countless dozens who willfully ingnored us or impeded us.

Tim and Suzanne gave the boys some model cars (and tickets for the Children's Museum), but in true Sam and Caleb fashion, they were more interested in the beer bottles, bottlecaps, and the church key.

In my previous life in Boston, I never had any call to visit the New England Aquarium or the Children's Museum, and it was great fun to discover what lay inside both buildings. The Aquarium's giant central tank -- complete with tiger sharks and giant sea turtles -- was really impressive, as was the open community of penguins that surrounds that tank. A couple years ago, penguins seemed poised to be the posterbirds for conservative family values, until it turned out that penguin love is no more bound by supposed natural order than are we humans. Certainly, the very public penguin sex we observed at the Aquarium suggests that some arctic birds march to a different beat. (Thanks to Elissa for the heads up on the gay penguin kid's book, linked above.)

A side trip to Northampton took us into Look Park (on half-price Wednesday!), where the kids rode a steam train and visited a very small zoo. We watched the gang of goats butt heads, and Caleb chased chipmonks while squealing in pure delight. (Sam, here and with the pigeons and swallows outside the Children's Museum, roars his fearsome T-Rex roar.) For some reason, we all shopped for candy in the city itself, and then Chris and Lisa successfully prosletyzed for Harrell's ice cream. (Northampton was quite a cozy little place to live, and who knows what role it may play in our far distant future, particularly given that it has a Henshaw Street and a Lathrop Retirement Community.)

Sam picked up the notion that any particular point could be pointed to and perhaps accessed, leading to the signifier "right there," which in turn led to this sort of request: "Mama, can I go stand over there right there?" Which is so syntactically Milwaukean I could plotz.

We got caught in a downpour while trying to get to Courtney's apartment in the North End. We waited for a cab for a long time under a hotel canopy; the hotel staff were nice enough to give lollipops to our impatient kids. The lollipops were soon thrown to the pavement -- their paper sticks were still there the next morning, with all the candy washed away.

Courtney and Deb, former coworkers from Harvard, shared wine and pizza and gossip and kid's books. The boys were equally enticed and repulsed by Courtney's stuffed friend Monk, and the boys made thorough rambunctious exploration of all of the aparment's 440 square feet. Sadly, the rain kept us from a North End street fair -- always culturally worth it -- and, more's the pity, cannoli.

...To Be Concluded