Leslie Epstein
I MOVED TO BOSTON thirty years ago from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and for many years I thought of New York every day, the way one thinks of a distant lover. Impossible, on Broadway, to walk a block without seeing something, or someone, interesting, invigorating, threatening; on one’s toes, thus, one feels altogether more alive. By contrast, I’ve seen about six such things in my decades in Boston and Brookline, half of them involving dead animals. Until just the other day, it’s been a snooze through existence. And yet, over time, one arranges a life for oneself and with luck falls in love with that too. Here, more or less randomly, more or less from the top of my head, is what I have been able to piece together and what, should I have to leave this city, I would undoubtedly miss with a great deal of my heart:
First things first: The everything bagels from Iggy’s. My tennis matches at the BU Rec Center, though not when my Russian partner skims a drop shot a half inch over the net. Bol’shoe spasibo! The double row of sycamores on Parkman Street. The drives to Mohegan Sun or Rockingham to play poker with Ernie and Bernie and Marty. The photograph of Uncle Julie hanging above the rattan chaise at the Casablanca in Cambridge. What? The Casablanca has just closed? Will Sari, its owner, miss me? Up until recently, all my representatives in Washington, particularly Ted Kennedy, who as senator had probably saved and enhanced more lives than all but two or three presidents. But Barney Frank and John Kerry too, both of whom have gone on to other things. Tommy Heinsohn. The brisket sandwich at Rubin’s. The cabbage soup at Rubin’s. The number 16 and the number 21 pizzas at Otto’s. Anything at all at Oleana. The fact that the hundreds of thousands of students in Boston remain forever apple-cheeked as I turn increasingly gray. Eugene Goodheart. The other gentlemen in all three of my poker games whose lives I have considerably enriched. Ha Jin. Angell Memorial Hospital, for more than once putting Jasmine back on all four of her feet and then so humanely ending the one life that canines get. Would that we treated each other that way! Elizabeth Warren. Jim Carroll’s columns in the Boston Globe, and Dan Wasserman’s cartoons: to each my personal Pulitzer Prize. Walking down Newbury Street to see the Joseph Solman shows at the Mercury Gallery and the Joe Ablow shows at Pucker. What? The Mercury has moved to Rockport? And Joe Ablow is no longer with us? Oh yes he is, just go to the Pucker and see. Strolling down Beacon Street to Fenway—sometimes stopping at the wonderful Busy Bee—to take in a game with my son Paul from my other son’s box. What? Certain things have changed? Very well, if I have to, I shall walk all the way to Wrigley. The music, Ravel, Debussy, et al., on 95.3, WHRB. Shem, aka Steven Bergman. John Silber, now gone, who one moment roared, “We’re not turning BU into a love nest!” and the next made sure that a worthy student at Brookline High got into the university after all. The drunken Gehry buildings at MIT. Room to Grow. The little plastic trucks and shovels that the town of Brookline deposits in the sandbox at Minot Park, for what my granddaughter, Annika, thinks is her exclusive use. The coffee candies, wrapped in gold and brown, at Trader Joe’s. Ditto their individually wrapped pieces of cooked chicken breasts. One minute in the microwave, served with cold coleslaw. And their Hahn Cabernet or the—cheap!—Mission Point Pinot Noir. The fact that in an hour and a half in one direction one can be at Crystal Lake in Orleans and that in an hour and a half in another direction one can be at Barnacle Billy’s in Maine. No-fat frozen yogurt at J.P. Licks. The dog biscuits at the counter of the Brookline Booksmith (Jasmine used to say). Little Brothers–Friends of the Elderly. My bike route: Beacon, past the Weston Golf Course, back on Commonwealth—nineteen huff-and-puff miles. How you can stand at the corner of Huntington and Gainsborough and hear more of those apple-cheeked youngsters practicing the oboe and singing their scales. Peter Gammons. Caroline, my assistant. The shy look of the men when they come into the Studio. Putting my feet up on the front-row mezzanine rail at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Paul’s bald head glistening as he runs down Beacon Street in the marathon. My own jogs five and a half times around the Brookline Reservoir (equaling five miles, half walking, half running, in exactly an hour) or down Memorial Drive: the river, the sails, the golden dome, and above all the Hancock Building changing shape, dieting, turning into a silver sliver, a wisp, vanished, gone!