The Real Charlie

Another Thing That Never Happened When I Drove To Work

I've been taking the train most days for almost two full months. Early on, I noticed that Eddie, the morning conductor on the front of my train, seemed to know everyone, bantered with the regulars, and was generally a funny, pleasant guy. I also heard rather quickly that he was about to retire, taking a buyout from the commuter rail operator.

When I got on the train today, I was slipped a little piece of paper and a woman whispered to me the cryptic words "it happens right after Wellesley Farms." The paper had the lyrics to "For he's a jolly good fellow," and instructions to sing once we heard the whistle. Once we pulled out from Wellesley Farms, a shrill whistle was heard, and both decks of my packed double decker car burst into song. Eddie was duly impressed, and touched. At South Station everyone stopped to shake his hand, and wish him well in his retirement.

When you ride to work alone in a car, that never happens. The commuter rail can be unreliable at times, too hot often and too crowded always. But it is always just a little bit of community, at least for forty minutes each way weekdays.

Strep and Mexican Cheese

Last Friday I started to feel really run down at work. I thought that I was having a Lyme disease relapse - I get this from time to time - but I powered on through the day and got home. We celebrated Stella's birthday (yay two years!) and after that I collapsed. I didn't even eat dinner. I woke up on Saturday with a 102 temperature and a sore throat. My sister spent most of her childhood with strep or recovering from it (and eventually got her tonsils out, which ended the problem forever), so I knew the signs. I went to urgent care (my doctor doesn't swab on Shabbos), got the throat culture and the penicillin, and went home. I am 80% better today, but bizarrely, my culture came back negative! The doctor said to keep taking the penicillin, the test was probably incorrect. Maybe I have stealth strep? As usual, I blame my two little petri dishes for bringing me this little gift from one of their play dates.

In other news, MMWR warns us, again, of the dangers of unpasteurized cheese. This time, drug-resistant salmonella from Mexican-style cheese. Not cheddar. But eating cheese from your local corner market is still safer than eating a dead beached whale. In the same issue: fishing fatalities. To the fisherman, not the fish. That wouldn't be news.

Thus Spake Stella, and Open Studios Results

So we drove into Brookline today for Brookline Artists' Open Studios, during which I got four great collages by the very cool and very hospitable (as in he let my children eat most of his corn chips and mess up his son's magnetic art board) Fred Free. Specifically I got this piece, this smaller piece, and two others. I have a cool new office with huge, bare walls in need of some interesting things. Combined with some work that I have at home, and an old picture of my father in the loading dock of the warehouse my grandfather built, I can get a nice little office gallery going. Oh, and Abby Whileshenaps, the award-winning artist who happens to be the love of my life, whose studio is located two feet away from my side of the bed and who is the mother of my children, is supposed to make me a bird. Someday. Ahem.

Anyway, on the way there Roxanne dozed off after Daddy sang some Passover songs, and Stella (who will answer inquiries as to her age with a hearty "Two In April!" and queries as to her mission with an emphatic "destruction!") held forth with the following story:

"Once, there was a dragon, who ate one hundred waffles. The people all went down the hill to see daddy get off the train. Um, the end."

Abby and I listened respectfully, and did not laugh out loud. We are still trying to understand the subtext obviously embedded somewhere in all of this.

No More Speed Trap Warnings

So my reading public no longer gets speed trap warnings, as I am no longer driving to work much. But I figured that I'd share some interesting things that I see from my Worcester-Framingham line commute into and out of Boston. If you ride the rails with me, you might see these things too, or you might be sound asleep or engrossed in the Wall Street Journal like the other 80% of the people on the train.

Wellesley Hills: the little shelter here is on the back of old Wellesley Hills station, designed by the great H.H. Richardson. Like most of his beautiful train stations, including the one in my native New London, Connecticut, it is sadly underused and in disrepair, now a frame shop and a cleaners in the shadow of an ugly post office.

Wellesley Farms: another H.H. Richardson station, next to a little pond. This one is a gutted hulk. Some of the landscaping, designed by Richardson's good friend and neighbor in Brookline, Frederick Law Olmstead, survives here.

Near the 128/Pike interchange: you pass through an oddly pastoral landscape, the grounds of the Martin Golf Course, and then over the Charles River. I have seen Great Blue Herons from the train here, and some cool modernist office buildings north of the tracks, near the Pike.

Newton: the stops here are rickety shacks on the edge of the turnpike. Each used to have a nice Richardson train station, all demolished for the Pike. I smile at West Newton and Auburndale, looking at the cars sitting in traffic. Near Newtonville, look north of the tracks for the National Guard armory, a nice old Victorian drill hall, complete with "MVM" lettering for the old Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

Brighton: the graffiti picks up and starts to get pretty complicated here, the surroundings more urban. Brighton used to have a Richardson train station, also Pike-ified, Allston has a knock-off station designed by H.H.'s successors that is now the Sports Depot bar.  Some neat train cars in the big CSX yard next to the Pike.

Yawkey: a parking lot, with beautiful old Fenway in the background. Sox fans, and medical area commuters, deserve so much better. Ever more complex graffiti in this area. Check out the neat Fenway Studios building south of the train line after Yawkey Station, but before the Pru Tunnels.

Back Bay Station: grungy, smokey, loud, the cloaca  of the line. What a loathsome place to start or end the day. I can't wait to leave and emerge into the light along the Pike, with Chinatown and Bay Village to the north and the architectural variety of the South End to the south.

South Station: the Gillette plant and the postal center sit to the east, stark and industrial. Along the tracks, just before the station, the railroad workers have built a little house for a dog or a cat, complete with bedding and food. Watch for the sleek Acela trains, and the rare sighting of the Lake Shore Limited with its archaic sleeper cars.

Here I cut out the side door from South Station onto Atlantic Avenue, after tossing out my paper and my chewing gum. I am amidst the towers of the Financial District, and there are more things to see -  beautiful, strange, historical, mysterious. Another post.