They'll Build a Statue for Us

Today on the 87 bus, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac - no actually I saw a teenage boy with curly hair wearing a red knit cap and a Che Guevera t-shirt - smiling and reading a copy of J.D. Salingers's 'Franny & Zooey'.

I was listening to the Decemberists' 'Of Angels and Angles' from their new CD Picaresque on my iPod, and gazing blankly out the window as the vinyl sided triple deckers of Broadway rolled past me like a hand-cranked back-drop for a high school play.

My work is in the process of relocating to downtown Boston - so we have the rest of the week off as thousands of gray BostonCrates filled with future fodder for archeological excavations get systematically shuttled to the newly assembled rows of cubes in the newly renovated building on Boylston street near Copley Place.

Upon surfacing at Park Street after buying a green weekly combo pass with a sparkly foiled "T" on it, I was struck by how many times I have walked through this scene over the years - er, decades.

Having gone to college in Framingham for half a decade, I never was more than a $5 Peter Pan ride away. Every landmark held countless memories. It was the same statue I passed: as a boisterous middle-schooler eager to spend my holiday money and take pictures with my friend Tom, as a sulking high schooler listening to The Cure on my casette walk-man whilst wearing a black cardigan over a paisley shirt, as a a high-spirited college student showing my out of state friends around, that I threw up on after engaging in that egg eating contest with that circus emcee, as a first post-college job worker seeing the city anew through the eyes of the employed to now - 8 years on, somehwat more established - watching the city continue to grow and build and real estate and gas prices soar.

Park Street still attracts its mix of destitute and wide eyed tourists alike: a mix of the the crowd outside of the Today show and the extras from The Fisher King. I guess the difference in this iteration of the aging game was that I had my own apartment and family of cats (and wife) to go home to. (To go home to is a euphemism for support. Support is a euphemism for give money to.)

This thought was comforting but also took some of the magic out of the city. In my youth, it had been a cool place where anything could happen, now it was just the place down the train line to spend money quickly.

I took a walk around downtown crossing and mulled over my impending tonsillectomy in mid August. I was thinking about how fast time can go - and that before I know it the 2 or 3 weeks of recovery will be over and I will be waking up an energized new man. I passed Hip Zepi's and thought about that article I had read in The Herald this week about the trend in teenage fashion of kids buying fake bullet proof vests. I thought about the reaction I would get at work if I sauntered in wearing one on casual Friday. What what.

As I caught the reflection of my puckered new green stripey and embroidered shirt from Banana Republic in the window of the Emerson radio station (and grimaced to myself at the paunchy silohuette I cut) - I thought how useful more energy would be to put towards more exercising.

Reading through people's accounts on the web of their bouts with sleep apnea for the years preceding surgery - I recognized my own history of sleeping extremely late on the weekends. To think that, at least partially, it was due to these two super-sized tonsils at the back of my throat. I pictured a time lapse of the downtown Boston skyline as mammoth Jenga contraptions of concrete and iron rose where once triple X neon signs blinked - all while I tossed and turned in the throes of my weekend slumber, 'dull torpor'.

As I saw that rush-hour was approaching - I decided to skip browsing at Borders and beat the train congestion.

My earphones drowned out the Park Street performer playing harmonica with the opening drum beats of Terrence Trent Darby's 'Wishing Well' and I boarded the half full Alewife bound redline car - ready to head home, stealing time, underneath the proverbial sycamore tree.