Boston is a city of memories; it lives them and breathes them. Anchored by history, oftentimes, it is mired by it. Non-natives hear about Boston in textbooks probably written by Bostonians, bred within the hallowed halls of any one of the colleges or universities concentrated within a few square miles of each other, anchoring the T-subway line, connecting-the-dots between a myriad of intellectual hot-spots. If you start at the very end of the Red Line, at Alewife, you'll soon hit Harvard College at the Harvard stop, then two stops after that, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Kendall/MIT.
Crossing the Charles River onto the other side, you pass the Charles/MGH stop in order to switch to the Green Line at Park Street. From there, you take the train to Hynes/ICA for Worthington College near the Institute of Contemporary Art or go past to hit Boston University (somewhere along Commonwealth Avenue) a few stops after that. Or, you can go all the way through to the end of the B route to Boston College in Chestnut Hill. If you take the Green D route, however, as most baseball enthusiasts do, you can step off at Fenway to attend the temple dedicated to the Red Sox – Fenway Park -- for schooling in a sports-centered spirituality. But if you stay on the Red Line and get off at Downtown Crossing, you'll be able to get to Boston Vis-Arts where a new generation of media artists and filmmakers incubate alongside graphic designers and animation aspirants. On the other hand, if you transfer there instead to the Orange Line, you can ride the T slightly south and get off at Back Bay, so you can stroll to Boston Bay College, just a few blocks away.
It's the day before Thanksgiving when you, Andie McPhee, embark from the Harvard Square stop on the Red Line to ride the T to Downtown Crossing. A fine autumn day, it's just one of many during your first semester at Harvard. As a new Harvard co-ed, you eat, sleep, and breathe that renowned heritage into your skin, take it deep through to the marrow of your bones, absorb it within every cellular process in your being. Especially since your father had gone to Harvard. As well as your grandfather. And his father before him. So you are a fourth-generation legacy – the first woman in the family -- and you are resolved to shoulder it well.
Yet while you settle in your seat on the train, you idly note the different stops along the way, paying attention to the individual folks that get on and off, noticing details and dynamics and relations between. They shift and evolve from stop to stop. At one point, you glimpse an abandoned tunnel leading to nowhere -- the Boston subway traces its origins all the way back to the 1890s, making it the oldest rapid transit system in the United States so there are several of these – and though once, you might have found that open-ended pathway worrisome (some time ago, you were fixated on tying up all possible loose ends), you muse over more vague possibilities now, some, even whimsical. Maybe one of those dark passages leads to a fairy-land in another dimension, you fancy – a magical meantime that opens up to a brave new world. It's a silly thought, but it makes you smile. You've had that magical meantime. And it was real.
The whole summer prior, the entire year before, and half of a high school full-term before that, you spent an intervening time in Italy, among light-dappled valleys, sunny meadows, and lush, green gardens, while reveling in ancient times contemporaneous to now. In that meantime you expanded, you grew; your visions became larger, and now you see more clearly. You met new people, learned a different language, and loved diverse men. You created a new self – more relaxed amidst your pressures, open to change and evolution, settling into that sanity you believed elusive. But it was within you all the time.
So now you know that Life is more than books and grades and structure and rules. You are still driven, will always be driven, to overcome and succeed. However, you are no longer consumed, you don't feel constricted. On this day, you make a point to take a much-needed break – a trip to the outside world, as it were. You have left the ivy-covered campus of your enclosed Harvard world to visit another one you often keep at bay, because to some degree, you left it behind, long ago. Not because you wanted to, but because you needed to.
When you disembark at Downtown Crossing, you emerge from that transit underground up into a crisp, sunny day, a bit on the cold side because of a harsh breeze blowing. Your eyes spy a familiar face and you break into a grin, then a happy jog, to greet this old friend. Though he attends a school just several T stops away from yours, you both are too busy to see each other. Until now.
And as one meantime inevitably ends, another invariably begins
