Sandwich, Boston, Fenway

Yesterday around 3:30 pm I was sitting in on eof the seats on top of the green monster, the legendary backdrop for Red Sox games since 1911. I had seen Fenway Park hundreds of times in my life, from reruns of "Field Of Dreams" to baseball highlights all summer long, to compulsive Red Sox watching whenever the chance arrived. So much of it had to do with the field, this oddly magical place full of legends and gravity and basically a time capsule of boyhood.

And so I was there looking out over the empty infield (I was on a tour and there wasn't a game going on) and it was good.

We drove up to Boston yesterday, it being a surprising only an hour from Sandwich, arriving early enough in the morning. We parted from the truck on a sidestreet in the financial district and headed out into the biggish city. Boston's financial district reminded me a bit of San Francisco, imposing buildings, rich history, and yet eerily calm, quiet and nearly empty. The size of the cities must be pretty similar, by my highly inaccurate gauge, but the feel is different, of course. The immediate thing once we got out of the financial district was the distinct feeling that all the kids there, and there are many, are doing college type things, recovering from hangovers, on drugs, enraptured by thesis ideas, professing, anything really, everyone in that town seems like the are affiliated with a school in some way, and they probably are. But its loose, not too academic. We sat on a bench in the Boston Commons, we saw Paul Revere's tomb. We caught the oldest subway in the country and had greasy pizza in the Boston Market. It was a fast day, ending with a past sunset sweep out of town on the interstate, glad to be heading back to the closest thing to home we have.

Time is as usual kind of crawling by in a speedy way, like a stealthy baby through a house with no furniture. The air has noticeably changed even in the time that we have been here, now the evenings carry a hint of bite, and the air moves real confused like, with leaves not knowing whether to fall or not.

We've been on Cape Cod for a good long time, and here's why, as if an explanation is needed.

Because in the months before we set out on this trip, this tiny town of Sandwich was marked on our map. It was a detination in itself, and at the time it was unearthly, as if getting there would be akin to crossing into a different dimension entirely. And yet it was there, waiting for us to make it there. The whole country was in between, and the whole of time and weeks was in between, and money spent, but what really awaited us was congratulatory post cards and a sense of accomplishment, of relief.

Another reason is because when you have the privilege of staying in a beautiful house with a big back porch within walking distance to the tiny village center in the most quaint and untainted town you've ever been in, you tend to try and relish it. It doesn't happen often. The simpleness of riding a bike underneath old reaching trees along bumpy sidewalks in front of classic old victorians is like being a chance to be 10 years old again, racing to see what it feels like to go fast, that's it, no other reason.

And yes, it sounds trumped up but believe me its not.

The other reason may be that you are suddenly across the continent from everything you've known, and the goal in your life that had been there for a while, a long while, to cross the united states in a goofy and nonchalant manner, with no timeline and no destination and not even enough money really and to just say you did it. You needed to see the whole of the country as a promise to yourself and to the person inside you who may make it someday to live to be 79 or older, and to tell yourself that you did it.

It may be now that everything is too big to really rationalize and that it simply takes a few weeks to begin to break it down: you are in your twenties, you have no career necessarily, you may or may not want to go to grad school, it depends on how much deeper in to debt you go, the road trip will end at some point anyways, so no reason to rush it because it will feel sad enough when it does, et cetera. In other words: you have your whole life to figure out, and you had better do it soon, lest you should end up another sad minded person whose dreams never quite materialized, whose mind kind of got keener and colder and more closed.

The last revelation is that sometimes its ok, important, critical to shut your mind up and say "OK, I think that I can handle this, I deserve this. i've waited my whole life for this, worked shit jobs for this, struggled through the lean times for this, gambled on this: my life now. In Sandwich. Sitting outside the library on a perfect calm Sunday, hushed conversations hanging on the air, cars filing by towards the weekend destinations, not much else really.