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Menino and Magliozzi, I Hardly Knew Ye

Although I recognize Tom Menino’s salt-of-the-earth goodness (he wasn’t called the “urban mechanic” for nothing), his death marks the first landmark Boston moment I’ve not emotionally responded to in my lifetime. I realize it’s because his entire mayoral reign (1993-2014) dovetails with my time in NYC. Have I finally become more of a New Yorker than a Bostonian? My new license plates would suggest so but–as I type this–I learn of the death of Car Talk’s Tom Magliozzi, and it hits me like a ton of bricks. He was the best wiseass (and, ironically, crucial in keeping my car Sadie alive). It’s such a Mass cocktail of tragedy and oddity: two Italian-Boston working-class heroes with startlingly similar names dying within days of each other. I can’t help admiring the confluence even as I realize no one here will care. Oh, I miss my people. Maybe you really can’t take the Masshole out of the girl.

Fall Aside

Some parentheses-laden mash notes from a mid-morning walk down the Greenpoint stretch of Manhattan Avenue: 1. I love when health food store clerks loll outside their work buildings, smoking. (NYC balance, baby.) 2. I love being able to wear a trench coat without sweating. (Flasher chic, baby.) 3. I love lower-income children more easily than well-off ones (at least as a passer-by; no one said life was fair). 4. I sort of love when Poles speak to me in their mother tongue. On one hand, the reason I don’t know Polish is because all my Polish (Jewish) ancestors either died a horrible death at the hands of (possibly) their ancestors or just barely escaped them. On the other hand, it’s a high compliment to be confused for a Polish lady. 5. Speaking of which, I love the Polish lady I met in line at the dollar store. When I complimented her turquoise beret, she pulled it off and showed me her bald scalp. “I’m sick,” she said, and held my hand until the cashier was ready to ring up her purchases. (I send her more love right now.) 6. I I love, love, love October. Come autumn, even this finely feathered city smells, looks, and feels magic. Smoke, drying leaves, dying earth: No wonder my best love affairs have always begun this time of year. (Extrapolate away.)

No Candle Can Replace It

I’m really milking every last bit of summer out of this month. Today I had to read the wonderful book Tracks for a gig so I planted myself behind Red Hook Fairway and read the afternoon away on a bench overlooking the NY Harbor. As the sun dropped lower, more and more locals and Fairway workers came out to watch. I couldn’t stop grinning. When hanging out on the West Coast years ago, I’d been so touched that people would casually congregate on streets and in parks to watch the sunset. I’d never imagined we hardbitten New Yorkers would do the same (which goes to show you how much time I spend on the West Side Highway, I suppose). It all felt even grander since I’d spent the day with a loner in her Aussie desert, widenening into a wordlessness that she painted with the same voluptuous palette.

On the way home, I felt that sour apple feeling: happy to be nestled in a poncho and a long skirt, sorry the layers were rapidly growing essential. It reminded me of when I started back East on my road trip around the country. (My sweet auto Sadie was but a lass back then.) The first night the sun dropped in my rearview mirror rather than my windshield, I wept bitter tears. From then on, I understood manifest destiny not just as a race toward gold but as a race toward the glory of the sun itself. I felt that same grief tonight as the day exploded in the back of my now-geriatric car—and so early, too. Oh, oh, oh. A real lump in the throat. Anyway, apples and fire: that’ll be this fall.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy