Myth Happens

I have been out in the world. Two days in a row, even. I like it.

Yesterday greygirlbeast and humglum were scouting locations in Mount Auburn Cemetery, so I met them after my voice lesson in Belmont. (As I got off the 73, a young man at the front of the bus told me suddenly that he liked my style. I was wearing my usual leather jacket and carrying a computer bag full of sheet music and a trade paperback of Francesca Forrest's Pen Pal, so I think he must have been referring to the fact that it has finally become warm enough for me to wear my flat cap rather than my pseudo-fur-lined winter hat.) I hadn't been to the cemetery in years. The morning was overcast in that damp way that makes a person worry about having left their umbrella at home, but the afternoon let slip some actual sun in which we were not even cold as we hiked through streets of slate and sandstone and the used-soap pathos of white marble after acid rain's been at it for years. Nothing was quite blooming, except for some hyacinth tips in the wet earth, but there were catkins and a faint rust-colored fuzz in the trees; we found a pond at the base of a natural amphitheater scooped out of the hills, but within its ring of leaf-steeped water, it was frozen. A glove stuck up out of the ice, pretty much asking to become an urban legend. I didn't have a camera, but I'm hoping some of the pictures I know were taken make it to LJ. It was good time with people I hadn't seen in far too long, the world beginning to thaw and brighten. Afterward I walked to Harvard via Brattle Street and crashed very shortly after getting home, having gotten about three hours of sleep the previous night.

Today derspatchel and I just walked everywhere. We went over the hill of Powder House Park and up Summer Street, where a house in which Rob hasn't lived for eight years is being so completely rebuilt, workmen had punched the back of the roof out and we could see sky through the windows. The little thrift shop on the way into Union Square turns out to be called Odds & Ends and we didn't buy anything, but it was never open when we walked by before, so I had to go in. There was a postcard written in elegantly copperplate French that was almost worth taking home to seed a story. The shelf of used paperbacks was seventy-five percent Stephen King and the remaining quarter Dean Koontz and Peter Straub. I ran an errand at the bank in Union Square and we decided to turn toward Inman next, but first we stopped into the post office to look at the endangered mural—1937, a scene from the American Revolution in classic Rivera-influenced WPA style. I hope very much that someone in Somerville has the technical know-how and the community pull to remove and preserve it; I do not believe that every old thing needs saving, but I don't like the destruction of public art. Inman contained 1369 Coffee House, which says it will start making my favorite drink of theirs (Brazilian limeade—lime juice and condensed milk) in a month or so, and Lorem Ipsum, from which Rob departed with the complete published script of Beyond the Fringe and I with a five-dollar first edition of Jan Morris' Last Letters from Hav (1985; the cover looks like several paintings by de Chirico, which feels like a warning). We made an appointment at Inman Oasis. And around five o'clock we ended up at R.F. O'Sullivan & Son, which in fact makes extremely impressive burgers. Also potato skins. With stuff all over them. We are definitely going back sometime after we've recovered.

I like that the weather is warm enough now to walk about in—at one point on Summer Street, I was thinking I should have worn a T-shirt. I like that Rob is back to walking around with me, which makes roaming the city a mutual experience. I don't like that I lost seven minutes this afternoon to an incredibly unpleasant, deceptive hard-sell call from Comcast, but it didn't undermine the day. I hung up and we went out.

And it's spring.