A friend and I stopped into a bakeshop cum coffee emporium the other day. The coffee was so so, but the crumb cake was unbelievable. It was almost as good as what we used to get at that little bakery on Charles Street in Boston.
Then the conversation started, and the subject turned once again to crumbs, but the human kind. I scored a smile from her when I quipped, taking a bite of my cake, that I like one, almost as much as I despise the other. And I started talking about Boston in the old days.
On the Hill
Every summer I’d take off from grad school and head north for a summer spent living in one of Boston’s most disepitomable rooming houses. Why there? Well, Jerry had been a shipmate of my dad’s. On my first stay there in 1969, he’d pegged me by my last name and as a look-alike of my dad at the same age. Then came a lengthy interrogation on what my dad had been doing since swallowing the anchor ( sailor talk for coming ashore permanently).
After that, my cat, Clancy, was named the official ship’s cat for the rooming house. He had free run from the fore top to the peak to hold. And for his services, and in appreciation of my dad being a shipmate, a small discount was offered.
After that, every summer I’d make my way north to the tiny room on the third floor. I worked the seven till three shift at Boston hospitals for days, and afterwards made my way to the Charles River and sailed until early evening. I was really working for what was crumbs, but on weekends I might be invited to sail in Boston Harbor. It was a good deal away from school and the only books I cracked open were science fiction.
Drink Up!
Years before, I had lived on Beacon Hill and hung with my disreputable friends at the Harvard Gardens on Cambridge Street. There, I could occasionally find friends from the old days, like my almost friend John. John was a con artist with both a heart and artistic flair. He always insisted that a good con “enrolled” the fish, or mark. He also preferred clipping the wings of the unsavory, criminal, and people for whom the term crumb was an understatement.
Regrettably, the Harvard Gardens is very upscale these days. The old rooming house was converted into a fancy condo, and the neighborhood has been gentrified and is unrecognizable. I went on a real estate website and looked at photos of the interior of the place on Grove Street we’d called the Folkie Palace. I could almost bring to mind the murals my friend Bill had painted on the walls, and the living room with all the mattresses.
Ok, admittedly, our lifestyle had been a bit crumby, but we’d had a great time.
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Happy days great post. 💜
Isn’t it strange to look at a real estate website and see what happens to the “old place” once it’s “gentrified”? I’ve been stunned by that looking at former domiciles in Denver and San Diego…
I feel like history was erased. But it seems that most of what was working class Boston, and Cambridge was erased and the current residents don’t have a clue. I guess they have their right to write their own history, but I see many of them aas rather colorless work drones with expensive tastes, but little real culture. There I go again, popping off!
It’s OK. As Lu Xun wrote in one of his great novels, a Chinese granny used to hit her grandson on the head with her thimble and say, “Each generation is worse than the last.”