Neil Swidey
HERE’S SOMETHING I love about Boston: it can sometimes feel comically small.
In 2004, I sat down for dinner at a trendy Newbury Street bistro with Nomar Garciaparra. The fan-favorite Red Sox shortstop, who for years had been compared to Ted Williams as the face of the franchise, was now in the final year of his contract. His relationship with the club had turned poisonous, and his equation with the media was even worse. Garciaparra had gone so far as to make a masking-tape perimeter around his locker and declare it a reporter-free zone.
A lot of drama had preceded my sit-down with the prickly ballplayer, including the interruption of my interview with his parents at Nomar’s house in Arizona when he had unexpectedly called home and was alarmed to learn of their cooperation with me. But a startling thing happened during this meal at Sonsie. Tight-lipped, tightly wound Nomar, whose rare interviews tended not to exceed twelve minutes in duration, started talking, and kept talking, as my tape recorder rolled. The conversation was going so well that I was afraid to do anything that might disrupt the rhythm. After the waitress had repeatedly refilled our water glasses, I had a powerful urge to use the men’s room. But like a child on an endless car ride along a desolate stretch of highway, I forced myself to hold it. When finally I relented and excused myself, I glanced down at my watch. We’d been talking for four hours.
The resulting article generated hundreds of letters and lots of impassioned commentary. But my favorite was an exchange on something called the Sons of Sam Horn, a Red Sox message board dominated by stat-head fanatics and unknown to most other fans. In my story, I had mentioned the unusual length of the interview, and that led one commenter to accuse me of being a fabulist. “No way did Nomar speak for four hours,” he complained. “This guy’s lying.”
Before I could decide whether to rise to my own defense, another user chimed in. “Believe it. It’s true,” this commenter wrote. “I was their waitress, and it sucks to have a table not turn for four hours.” (And here I thought I had tipped really well.)
Only in parochial Boston could the waitress serving you your medium-rare duck at an expensive restaurant also be trolling an obscure sabermetrics fan site in her off hours.
Yet here’s something else I love about Boston: it can sometimes feel fully global.
That’s true whether it’s the former African leaders taking up residence at Boston University, the members of oil-flush Middle Eastern families checking into the city’s hospitals for concierge health care, or the diplomats using Harvard and Tufts as negotiation/refueling stops between Geneva and Turtle Bay. And then there are all those restless minds at MIT whose ambition recognizes no terrestrial boundaries and who toil away in their labs to shape tomorrow’s world.
Or consider another of my most memorable meals. A few weeks after the September 11 attacks, I found myself sitting with Osama bin Laden’s youngest brother, Abdullah, in his Cambridge apartment. It was the first interview any member of the mastermind’s family had given since the twin towers came down. Abdullah had come to Boston from Saudi Arabia to study law at Harvard, and had liked it so much that he’d never left. Now he was leading me and a colleague on a short walk from his apartment to a dimly lit restaurant. The United States was still several days away from launching its war in Afghanistan, and several months away from helping to install Hamid Karzai as that country’s new leader. So it wasn’t until later that I grasped the significance of Abdullah’s choice of restaurant, the Helmand. Here I was interviewing bin Laden’s youngest brother at a restaurant owned by Karzai’s older brother.
The real beauty of Boston is that it manages to be big and small at the same time. Few of the most popular stops on the standard Boston tourist itinerary convey that distinguishing civic characteristic. Not the Freedom Trail, not Faneuil Hall, not even Fenway Park. (OK, maybe Fenway does a little.) To appreciate this fully, make a pilgrimage to a small bridge tucked inside a building on Massachusetts Avenue.
The Mapparium is my favorite of the city’s tourist attractions, even if relatively few tourists ever find their way there. It stands three stories high but is just thirty feet long. Like Boston itself, the place is small yet ambitious, intimate yet international, and in some ways absurdly rooted in its past.
The one-of-a-kind structure is a walk-in globe, made of glass and built to scale. Step onto the bridge and you can walk from India to Ecuador. The 608 panes of stained glass that make up the globe feature bright colors and the names of dozens of countries and colonies that no longer exist, from Siam and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to the Soviet Union. Although the world map painted inside the sphere was entirely accurate when the Mapparium opened in 1935, it’s been frozen in time. The only panel that has been changed in more than seventy-five years sits just below the glass bridge, a few shades of ocean blue darker than the rest. It replaced one a worker accidentally shattered when he dropped his wrench.
The Mapparium’s unusual acoustics add to its appeal. Shortly before my most recent visit, a young guy standing on one end of the bridge leveraged the globe’s unusual whisper-gallery acoustics to propose marriage to his girlfriend standing on the opposite end.
The Christian Science Church built the Mapparium when both the church and its international newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, were in their ascendency. Both have since suffered considerable decline, but like Boston itself, they work hard to prop up their standing by proudly displaying artifacts from a more influential time.
It’s remarkable that the Christian Science religion could be born in Boston and that Boston could become the home of its world headquarters. The message engraved in the handsome marble of the domed Mother Church, a blend of Byzantine and Italian Renaissance architecture, memorializes founder Mary Baker Eddy’s determination to reinstate primitive Christianity and spiritual healing. Despite the “science” in its name, it is a religion built on hostility to medical intervention. Yet just a couple of miles in either direction stand the world’s finest hospitals and research labs, our temples to modern medicine, where the high priests push the limits of intervention a bit more every day.
The audio recording that plays in the Mapparium intones, “Our ideas shape and reshape the world we live in.” In many ways, Boston is built on a powerful idea whose roots can be traced back to its rigid Puritan founding. Although it has been reshaped to embrace the coexistence that was painfully absent in those early days, the central message endures: if you believe in something, go all in.
In recent years, egged on by a generous tax credit, Hollywood filmmakers have turned Boston into a popular backdrop for their big-screen productions. Most of us Bostonians still haven’t decided how to feel about this. We like the attention from the visiting A-listers, and the newspaper gossip columnists in town certainly enjoy the respite from having to pretend that our usual supply of weathermen and restaurant owners are real celebrities. But the many years of seeing the Boston accent butchered onscreen by characters packaged in a handful of cardboard variations—from the slippery Kennedyesque pol to the effete Harvard intellectual to the drunk yahoo in a Bruins jersey—have left us all with a little bit of posttraumatic cinematic stress.
A notable exception to this filmography of shame is Good Will Hunting. Sure, the breakout hit from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck includes a few of those stock characters in minor roles. But since the movie was made by our own guys, the accents are spot-on, and the performances are packed with both heart and authenticity. What’s more, the film’s central theme exposes the false choice embedded in the many oversimplified takes on this deceptively complex city. You don’t have to choose between being smart and worldly and being loyal and local. Like Boston, you can be both.