Today's piece by Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic has been making the rounds on my Facebook and Twitter feeds today. Like many people, I have a lot of friends who went to college in Boston, and even a few who are Boston-area natives who have since moved away. As for myself, I briefly lived in Boston for three months over the summer of 2000, and Cohen's piece in The Atlantic struck a chord:
You May Leave Boston, But Boston Never Leaves You
Each year, the city absorbs into its colleges and universities tens of thousands of teenagers, 18-year-olds, from every corner of the world, each of whom is seeking, in one way or another, to learn something and to become whatever it is they are destined to become. The boy from Arizona, there on a scholarship, who has never before seen snow. The girl from Montana, who's never seen anything but Big Sky. The lucky son of diplomats. They all arrive in late summer to a city used to showing children what it means, and what it takes, to live in a great American metropolis. No other city in the nation does this as well.
More after the orange squiggle...
Boston was the first city I deliberately moved to on my own rather than being brought there by my family. After several years of frustration at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I left that school and made plans to transfer to the Boston Architectural Center to finish my undergrad degree. I loaded up a small U-Haul truck in Chicago, and arrived in Brookline on Memorial Day 2000. I landed a summer job at a small architecture firm in Cambridge, and made plans to begin classes in the fall. At that point in my life, I was a headstrong, conservative Republican who was closely following the ongoing Republican primaries. My views pretty much reflected those of my parents; my father is a Northern Kentucky native who did campaign work for Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell early in their respective political careers, and still proudly displays the hand-written thank-you letter from President Gerald Ford on the living room wall. Being in my early 20's, I obviously knew everything about the world.
Having grown up in a conservative Calvinist tradition, I was active with a Presbyterian congregation in Chicago. I had been warned that all the Presbyterians had been chased out of Boston at some point in history, and it was recommended that I seek out a Congregational or Episcopal congregation. After a period of shopping around, I found myself drawn to Trinity Church in Copley Square, less than a block away from where yesterday's bombings took place. Like my previous church in Chicago, it was a large landmark structure located directly across the street from a tall skyscraper named after John Hancock, so maybe that's why it seemed like a natural fit.
As I became more involved in the life of the parish, this Republican from the Midwest soon found himself surrounded by friends who were very liberal, very intellectual, and in a few cases, very gay. At first I felt like I was in a foreign culture, and in some respects, I was. And to my surprise, I discovered that I liked it.
The 2000 presidential campaign was in full swing that summer, with a formerly-respectable John McCain facing off against the Bush machine. I wasn't paying much attention to what was happening in the Democratic primary, but the GOP race was increasingly putting a bad taste in my mouth. It became obvious to me that an honorable war hero was having his character smeared by monied party bosses beholden to the Bush family, and that they would do anything to win. This was months before Bush vs. Gore and a year before 9/11 and Iraq, so this turned out to be only a vague foreshadowing of what would happen to our national political culture. But it still made me sick to my stomach.
Meanwhile, I was also looking for permanent housing in Boston, as my digs in Brookline were only a temporary summer sublet. I was completely unprepared for Boston's expensive housing prices. I soon got a taste of what it feels like to be completely priced out of a simple place to live, even while working full-time for what I thought were reasonable wages. It was a big wake-up call for me, and I found myself with a newfound empathy for those who aren't as well-off as me, and with a much clearer view of the forces that are destroying America's middle class. Hint: it wasn't my gay friends at Trinity Church.
There were also the little things about Boston that stuck with me.
There was the persistent stale popcorn smell of the subway platform at Downtown Crossing, and the distinctive voice of the automated announcements on the Red Line. They always sounded as if Agent Smith from The Matrix had taken over the train. "Next stop: Kendall Square. End of the line for you, Mr. Anderson."
I'm a lifelong Cincinnati Reds fan, but the best seats I ever had at a ball game were at Fenway Park. My boss, holder of Red Sox season tickets since baseball was invented, wasn't able to catch the game one day and gave his tickets to me and a co-worker instead, instructing us to take the rest of the day off. Our seats were on the first row, close enough to first base to count the stitches in the players' uniforms.
The Big Dig was in full swing, and I often wandered the site, peering through gaps in the barricades to marvel at the massive trench being dug under an active, elevated freeway. This would whet my appetite for large-scale urban infrastructure projects that I hope to be involved with professionally as an architect.
My office was roughly halfway between Central Square and Harvard Square, so after work, I would often walk up to Harvard Square, hang around, grab some ice cream at J.P. Lick's, and watch the buskers before taking the train home. Sometimes I'd grab dinner at Quincy Market downtown, or explore some other part of the city on foot. By the end of the summer, many of Boston's neighborhoods were as familiar to me as those of my own hometown.
I don't normally believe in love at first sight, but on July 4th, with the city crammed full of tourists, I came out of the J.P. Lick's location on Newbury Street and found myself walking alongside an incredibly stunning woman who looked about my age. We walked together for about a block, but before I could summon the nerve to say hi to her, she turned down a side street while I kept walking down Newbury. To this day I wonder how things might have turned out if I hadn't been so painfully shy.
Alas, my time in Boston came to an abrupt end only three months after my arrival. I had made arrangements for permanent housing down in Jamaica Plain, and had registered for classes at the Boston Architectural Center. One day I got a phone call from my soon-to-be roommate informing me that she had decided not to rent out her spare bedroom after all, and I suddenly found myself having to find new digs within a week or else end up homeless. It didn't help that I was now competing against twelve billion returning students for the same five empty apartments. On top of that, I was homesick for Chicago, and decided that Boston wasn't for me. A week after Labor Day weekend, I found myself back on the road to Chicago.
But by this time, my summer in Boston had changed me. I had finally admitted to myself that my world views had undergone a radical shift, and that they were diametrically opposed to the conservative ideology in which I had grown up. Liberals, intellectuals, and gays were no longer my enemies. My time at Trinity Church had also begun to shift me out of my rigid Calvinist theology, and two years later I was formally confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Although I'm not much of a churchgoer these days, I'm still officially on the membership rolls at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.
Cohen's piece in The Atlantic concludes:
No bombing can ever take away what Boston means to the men and women whose lives have been shaped by it over the generations. No tragedy can ever take away Patriots' Day, or the Marathon, or the city's pride and relief in having made it to another spring. For now, for today, perhaps it is enough to merely remind our friends and family there in the Hub that we are with them, that we never really left no matter how far away we may be, and that we'll be with them again next year, in sorrow and in joy.
My time in Boston was very brief and not always pleasant, but it was my first big step into adulthood. In retrospect, it was where I first began to articulate my own views about politics, religion, and social justice rather than simply regurgitating the ideologies that were fed to me while growing up in the Midwest and the South. The evolution of my world views had already been underway for a while, but Boston is where I found the confidence to openly acknowledge it. When I moved away, I was a different person than the one who arrived there three months earlier.
I've moved around a few times since then, and these days I consider myself more New Yorker than anything else, having moved to NYC the first time in 2004 and having lived there off and on since. And while I may not always be eager to admit it during baseball season, a little part of me will always be a Bostonian.
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