It’s 10:49 a.m. EST and I’m on the plane home. I say “home” with a sense of displacement, however, as these days I’m unsure where that safe place really is. If everything in life is so temporary, how can I choose a home base? I guess for now, home is just what is most familiar, and I can’t say I don’t intimately know this tiny corner of California. Like old friends, I know the smell, the taste, the nostalgia of the suburbian sidewalks I wandered as a kid.
You know you’re on your way to San Francisco when you sit down in row 10, seat C, and watch the passengers file past — long-haired hippies, people with piercings, tattoos, mountain men, business people, surfers and skaters, students, a guy with an entire desktop computer tower for a carry-on, Giants and Niners fans, kids, old Chinese ladies with bags of dim sum buns, engineers in Birkenstocks and free T-shirts and elastic shorts. A girl with a black leather jacket, a college sweatshirt, and an east coast heartbreak, who misses the snow and the hockey fanatics.
I spent Thanksgiving in Boston with Saturyne, and we’ve managed to see each other more in one year on the other side of the U.S. than we have in the past five years in California, half an hour away from each other. It’s a testament, I guess, to our bizarre and unique friendship, unphased by time zones or tidal patterns or the distance between our two warring planets. You might think that in order for such a friendship to survive, we’d have to get along. But still, after all these years, we crossed a street in Harvard Square yesterday only to argue about which way to go around a decorative sidewalk landscaping, took different routes, and ended up at the same place in the end. Upon reaching the Dunkin’ Donuts, we expertly forgot we had disagreed in the first place. And so the trend continues.
Beantown was beautiful, even in the dead, windy winter, and the Atlantic air dried my Pittsburgh tears cold on my face. As I sat in the courtyard outside Faneuil Hall, on hold with Oracle Travel and trying to blink and sniff away over a week of emotional trauma, Saturyne pointed across the street and said, “Hey, Ben Franklin is going into McDonalds.”
I wiped my eyes and looked, and sure enough, Mr. Franklin was crossing the street in his elaborate satin coat and tri-corner hat, apparently hungry for a Big Mac. “Let’s go take a picture with him,” Saturyne said excitedly. Well, what could I say? It’s not every day I see Ben Franklin. I finished booking my flight over the phone and hung up.
We found Ben sitting at a lonely corner table in the McDonalds with a coffee. We asked him if we could take a picture with him, and he asked for $2. “It’s for the kids,” he said. So his accent wasn’t too authentic but hey, if all the panhandlers dressed up as colonial figures I might be more inclined to give them money too. So as you can see, I got my picture taken with Ben Franklin in the Boston McDonalds. Ben told us he and his wife (Mrs. Franklin?) toured the country giving lectures to schoolchildren about his life and American history. He said his wife especially loved Florida and Sonoma, California. “We don’t drink the hard stuff,” he explained. “We’re wine lovers.” For those of you unfamiliar with northern California, Sonoma is a great place for wine lovers, so Mrs. Franklin has some pretty expensive taste. Some other things I didn’t know about Ben are that he’s also given lectures to foreign schoolchildren in other countries and he pays for all his travel himself. Ben opened his leather satchel to reveal a Dunkin’ Donuts bag and some crumpled flyers that he proceeded to hand to us. “You have Dunkin’ Donuts!” Saturyne exclaimed, who had become quite a connoisseur of the chain since moving to the east coast. “They give me two free donuts every morning,” he said. We were silently impressed.
I looked at his flyer. His business card was photocopied in the corner. Benjamin Franklin is alive and well. Have kite, will travel. I decided after this that if Oracle doesn’t work out, being a famous historical figure might not be such a bad job. You get free donuts every morning just for being a patriot celebrity, and everyone wants their picture taken with you. I’m just not sure who I would be. I bet all the good ones like Paul Revere are already taken. I wouldn’t want to dress up as a character that someone else had already picked, because then you’d get into the complications of explaining to kids how Mr. Revere could have been in Duluth, Minnesota and Tampa Bay, Florida within three hours of each other. “Fast horse,” probably wouldn’t cut it. It’d just get messy.
Aside from Ben, Saturyne took me to visit a lot of Boston, including the Commons, Quincy Market, the Cheers restaurant, the Freedom Trail, Lexington, Concord, Harvard Square and campus, and MIT. I saw the State House museum, Paul Revere’s house and grave, lots of statues, Beacon Hill, the Charles, Sleepy Hollow cemetery, and I rode the T. We went skating on Frog Pond Wednesday night, where I managed to wipe out quite glamorously in the middle of the rink after our hot chocolate/zamboni break. Friday at MIT and Harvard we wandered around imagining what it was like to be smart, and we rubbed Mr. John Harvard’s bronze foot for good luck. I’m not sure if it’s as good as rubbing Buddha’s belly, but from the gold shine on his toe, it looked like a lot of people didn’t want to miss the opportunity, just in case. I know there’s some places I’ve forgotten, but you can check out the pictures. Friday night we went to Big City, an outstanding pool house, bar, and restaurant, where I managed to win four out of four games of pool while becoming increasingly incapacitated by fruity drinks. It got to the point where I kept tripping on the carpet yet sinking balls all the while. Who knew. Maybe this would improve my bowling average as well. I’ll have to try it next time.
11:58 a.m. EST, though I’m not really sure what time zone I’m in right now. My laptop is about half dead, and I am somewhere over the middle of the big U.S. of A., so I think I’ll write an update later when I get back to the land of golden gasoline, bench-pressing governors, and 65 degree winters. With some regret, I’m hanging up my thermal underwear.
