It’s ok, I know it looked like you didn’t have any ideas that were going to cohere today, but you’ve got it now.
No, you’re right, I know, it totally isn’t your fault that you’ve been buried under a five-foot tall pile of snow. And right, the MBTA! The MBTA keeps shutting things down. And when it’s running, nobody wants to go anywhere because all buses and trains, when they turn up, are packed. And broken.
And, once you swallow your terror and get on board, there will be no sitting down. There will only be upright spooning with strangers, and then swaying together — human spoons, nested, swaying, pretending to be elsewhere. Thank god we’re all wearing big puffy coats to help us maintain the illusion of personal space.
Yesterday was nice, though, right? WBUR Meteorologist David Epstein said the weather wouldn’t get bad till late, so we could all keep our Valentine’s day plans. After gleefully trudging a mile and a half to Davis Square, grabbing, on impulse, 2 chocolate chip cookies for $2.49 at the Davis Au Bon Pain, you and Tim didn’t bat an eye at the mob of people waiting for the train. Delays due to a severe and mysterious medical emergency at the Park Street Station…Who Cares?! Love! Cookies! And the massive angry crowd of Valentines people was thinner at the back of the train! No stranger spooning! Score!
In spite of the falling snow, icy temperatures, wind, slush, and sidewalks-turned-giant snow caverns, you still got to the Russell House Tavern in Harvard Square for the raw bar, lobster sliders, and a lovely glass of bubbly. And then pen shopping at Bob Slate Stationers, followed by comics at The Million Year Picnic and a new pair of whale socks at Newbury Comics (which sells more socks now than it does comics…or music, but no matter. One must find one’s cool-ass socks somewhere.)
Over night, though. Wow. Here’s the neighborhood:
The beautiful, frozen MysticTim wanted to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic, so we walked over there. It usually takes us about five minutes to get to this bridge. This time, maybe twenty minutes? Twenty five?I could not see over the bridge’s snowbank to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic. But that’s ok!I can barely see over the top of this snow cavern, but that’s ok!My home is totally buried in snow, but that’s ok!And around the home, we have beautiful, terrifying Ice Dams that could fall and kill us, but that’s ok!Because under what other circumstances can I get away with rocking these cool-ass socks?
Yes, those socks are cool-ass, indeed. And it’s ok that the only thing you really have to blog about is the same thing that everyone in eastern Mass, parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine has been talking about for the past month? I mean, it is a crazy huge amount of snow. Seriously.
I am not in the habit of cataloging my movements as they happen, but I have become enamored of editing Wikipedia, enamored of writing women into it–and I got to make an infobox for Mary Almy, of Cambridge, Massachusetts architecture firm Howe, Manning & Almy, Inc.
This morning I went to a mini-editathon (only 2 hours) at the MIT library archives. We used archival materials to enhance the presence of some women in architecture and some other fields. We were about ten women, in the lovely archives room at Hayden library at MIT, typing away in silence. Very intense, concentrated, productive, and super fun silence. At an editathon, this kind of silence exists.
The reading room of the Institute Archives and Special Collections in building 14 at MIT. (public domain)
By the way, infoboxes are those things on the right side of a Wikipedia entry. They look like this:
a screenshot of the infobox I made (which no longer belongs to me, but to wikipedia and the world. CC-BY-SA.)
Better ones have pictures. But to post an image to Wikipedia, it either needs to be in the public domain or have Creative Commons licensing BY-NC-SA.
BY means “Attribution” (you have to give credit to source.)
NC means you can only use it for Non-Commercial purposes.
SA means “share alike,” which is more cryptic than the other pieces of the license. To “share alike” under Creative Commons means once you use the thing in question for your purposes, you have to apply the same CC license to it. (I am increasingly enamored of internet citation, it would seem. Nobody said I wasn’t a nerd.)
Anyway, images that meet those criteria are hard to find. The next time you do a google image search, try clicking the “Search Tools” button, and select “Usage rights” and then “non-commercial reuse.” A lot of the pretty pictures you just found will go away. Including all the ones you wanted. (Unless you image search kittens. A lot of kittens will stay. *there are kittens behind the “google image search” link.*)
I headed over to the MIT campus along my usual route, but this time in the dark. Spring semester won’t start for a few more weeks, and MIT people are in the middle of IAP, or “Inter-Activities Period,” a month-long session full of lectures, how-to classes, dance classes, tours, you name it. The only thing I had to do out in the world this day didn’t start until 7 pm. It was raining a little, but I walked the 30 minutes to the Davis T Stop anyway. I wore my duck boots. My umbrella just covered both my backpack and my head. I had to bring my laptop so that I could learn how to edit Wikipedia.
I know, it’s not really all that difficult to edit Wikipedia. Way back in 2008, I demonstrated to my Advanced Writing students that Wikipedia was not a viable source for their research by defacing Wikipedia myself.
“See, class? Any asshole can go in and make changes.”
I am not proud of this, though I’m pretty sure I only did it once.
One of the students in that class — a junior architecture major — politely raised his hand and informed me that what I did was not in the spirit of Wikipedia, that people work hard to get rid of this kind of vandalism, and that sooner or later, Wikipedia would be a viable reference for research. I was surprised to hear that what I’d done was vandalism, and I decided I probably wouldn’t do it again. As for the usefulness and viability of Wikipedia, I saw his point. I conceded that by the time he and his peers were making decisions about what constituted reliable sources, Wikipedia just might be on the list. But in 2008, it was not on that list, and they weren’t allowed to cite it.
But they were allowed — encouraged, even — to use it. Because the wikimedians creating and editing entries are held to the same standards as my students. They must cite reliable sources — sources that pass through some kind of editorial or peer review — if they want their work to stay on the site. Today, in addition to teaching students how to navigate the library and Google in order to yield strong sources, we also teach students to follow the trail of research that wikimedians leave behind, and then use those sources to dig deeper into the existing research and scholarship on their topics.
And that’s great! And generally, in life, if we encounter something we want to know more about — in my case, who succeeded whom in the British monarchy and how that whole thing works, or the defining characteristics of the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune— we probably go check out Wikipedia. And that’s great, too.
But there’s a problem: if you work hard, contribute to a field, and open doors for people like you who come after, but Wikipedia doesn’t know about you, do you make a sound? Well, yes. But if more and more people turn to Wikipedia to learn about the world around them and its history, then we want to have as much of that work represented as possible. And People of color, lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer people, and women in general, it turns out, are really underrepresented on Wikipedia.
I’d known about these representational issues for a while, though the gender gap has had the highest profile. Amanda Filipacchi’s April, 2013 New York Times Op-Ed, “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists,” first drew my attention to the gaps of Wikipedia. The recategorization of American novelists who happen to be female, from “American novelists” to “American women novelists,” has since been named “categorygate.” Sue Gardner’s response, “What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and sexism,” (posted to the WikiMedia blog in May of 2013) openly acknowledges the problem, and then clearly conveys how a better understanding of Wikipedia’s core principles can help us better address its gender gap. In “Wikipedia’s gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias,” Adrianne Wadewitz unpacks and comments on some problematic assumptions that go along with recent efforts to address this gap.
I just happened upon “Writing Women into Wikipedia” by chance, as I scrolled through the IAP listings. This editathon was unlike typical editathons that last only a few hours. This one took place over four nights. We wiki-newbies got solid introductions to the gender gap, Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, and different ways to contribute. And then we worked.
Some things about Wikipedia are easy. It was certainly easy for me to vandalize, back in the day. And Wikipedia encourages newcomers to start with simpler tasks, like fixing typos, and then working their way up to more substantive corrections. But “Writing Women into Wikipedia” is a little different. So many lists of writers, artists, innovators, and scientists (and so on, and so on) lack entries for women who belong there. Copyediting is great, but at this workshop we were encouraged to start new entries. And that was hard.
My “expert” topics are very well covered already. None of the authors featured in my dissertation are missing from Wikipedia. I wanted to help where help was needed, and I didn’t think fixing grammar on George Eliot‘s page was going to do that.
I’ve been very interested in comics, and frequently saddened by the dearth of female comics creators on my reading lists. I decided to start there. Then, I decided to go with British women comics creators, because 1) that keeps all my literary expertise in the same nation, and 2) though there were few American women comics creators listed, there were even fewer from Britain. It didn’t take me long to find my candidate, but it took a very long time to gather enough information from reliable sources to create an article for her.
But, at long last, I did. You know you want to see. Go ahead, click the link. Here she is: Suzy Varty
She’s just a little “stub” right now (that’s “an article containing only one or a few sentences of text that, although providing some useful information, is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, and that is capable of expansion.”) Not much, but something to build on. This little stub isn’t mine any more, though I will continue to tend her and help her grow. She belongs to Wikipedia and the world. Hopefully other wikimedians will add and edit her, and help her become a real article. Hopefully the wikimedians will let her stay.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
PS
If you’re interested in becoming a wikimedian, check out New England wikimedians for information about Wikipedia meetups, or just Google wikimedians in your area.
If you’re interested in addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia, here’s an overview of how to get involved, from FemTechNet. And here are some other WikiProjects:
African diaspora, a wikiproject that “aims to improve all articles related to the cultural contributions of people of African descent all over the world.”
Another date at a coffee shop. Tim on the left, Rebecca on the right.
CAMBRIDGE
April, 2005
1369 Coffee
The cafe was full, but I’d arrived early and gotten a small table, just across from the entrance. The door was open to let in the spring air.
I’d been frequenting 1369 Coffee since I first moved to Boston from Ohio, eight months prior. In 2005, the punk-rock aesthetic that most of the baristas sported seemed like the epitome of cool to me. And is that Radiohead’s The Bends I hear playing in the background? And are all these stern looking people reading and writing at their little tables probably intellectuals, poet/writers, or revolutionaries? Yes. After eight months living in Boston, 1369 Coffee in Cambridge was probably the coolest place I’d ever been. It made me cooler, just by walking through the door. Why hadn’t I arranged to meet my other blind dates here?
In his Friendster pictures, he was either peaking out from behind a fluffy cat or posed in quiet contemplation. In one picture, he was gazing out a large window, leaning forward, palms together, hands pressed against his lips. He looked like he was praying, which I found odd, but the cat pictures intrigued me.
He walked in and I set down the copy of The Journals of Lewis and ClarkI’d been studying. From my seat, he seemed impossibly tall. The late-afternoon sun blazed behind him through the cafe’s vast storefront window, lighting him up, golden.
We said hi. He smiled. I smiled. He’s way out of my league.
I’d seen pictures of Tim on Friendster, but that was only after I found him on Craigslist. This was a few years before the Craigslist killer, and before the “dating” sections became indistinguishable from the “casual encounters” section. I went with Craigslist, first of all, because the only other method of online dating that I knew was match.com, and the only people I knew who used it were my mom’s friends and my forty-something ex-boyfriend.
All of those people were divorced professionals. In 2005, I was 26 years old with a dial-up connection, and if I hadn’t just moved so far away from everyone I knew, I’d just keep relying on the age-old matchmaking network of friends’ friends congregating at parties and bars. But I didn’t know anyone in Boston. I’d spent the entirety of the fall semester either in class or in my bedroom. By January, I thought, that’s enough of that.
I first heard of Craigslist in May, 2004, when I first visited the Northeastern campus. I’d never had to find roommates from a distance before and was growing increasingly worried that I would wind up in a hugely over-priced utility closet in someone’s basement. The PhD student* who was showing us around told me I could find roommates on Craigslist.
“Regs List?”
“No, Cuh-raig’s List.”
I found the site. Its mass of tiny blue links dazzled me. You can find roommates here! And jobs, and bicycles, and clubs to join! And also, maybe, boyfriends.
These days, getting your pictures online is child’s play, but when I was reaching out through my dial-up connection I had to use my roommate’s scanner to upload my school ID picture. And I didn’t know how to change iPhoto’s HUGE auto-setting for attachments. After one or two gigantic picture exchanges that went nowhere, I established a rule of no pictures in either direction — a rule that would immediately sink any on-line dating endeavor today. I would respond only to well-written and intriguing Craigslist personals.
Between January and April 2005, while also keeping up with my grad school coursework, I went on about four blind dates a week, sometimes two dates in one day. Most of those were one and done, but I did manage to court a few guys for a while.
There was the research librarian who was very nice and smart, who was taken with the way I wrote Library of Congress call numbers on the back of my hand, but who reminded me too much of my uncle. There was the pony-tailed radical who seemed to know everyone, everywhere we went, and who lost interest in me because I asked too many questions. And finally, there was the Spanish graduate student — this was the most romantic courtship by far. On our second date, as I was telling a story about something, he abruptly leaned across the restaurant table and kissed me on the mouth. “I could wait no more,” he said. I liked him most of all…but alas, when I admitted that I was still dating around, he broke it off. Damned honesty.
But it doesn’t matter. I thought I liked the Spanish guy, but that was before I met Tim at 1369. I told him on our third date — after we’d decided to go steady — that until I met him, I thought I was doomed to never really like anybody ever again. Everyone I’d dated between January and April was cute, nice, smart, interesting — the test of writing style had worked! And yet…meh.
After things ended with the radical and the Spanish guy, I took matters into my own hands. I posted my first and last ever personal ad on Craigslist.
“I was just on my way to the sink to wash my hands of dating,” the ad read, “but maybe someone can change my mind.”
Turns out, someone could.
“Is that Lewis and Clark?!”
Was he genuinely interested in this book? It seemed so. We talked for a while about Lewis’s brooding intensity and Clark’s abysmal spelling. Apparently there had just been a story about the Lewis and Clark Journals in Smithsonian, so the extreme differences in their writing were fresh in his mind. I was impressed. I tried to impress him back with a story about how Clark doted on Sacagawea’s son. Clark nicknamed him “Pomp,” or sometimes, “Little Pompy.”**
This prompted some giggling on both sides, and then an awkward silence. We decided to go for a walk, down Mass Ave. to the Middle East Rock Club, then across the street and back up towards the cafe. We stopped at Rodney’s bookstore. We meandered through the stacks. When I found the “Cat” section, I stopped and started pulling out books. I wasn’t really into cats, but, for reasons then mysterious to me, I loved that he was.
Suddenly, he thrust a book toward me. On the page, a line-drawing of two cats mating.
“REEOW!!!”
He meowed and broke the quiet of the sleepy bookstore. He meowed, and I dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
In his pictures, at the cafe, and all along Mass. Ave., he radiated an intriguing combination of calm reserve and something else. Something very silly and mischievous kept peaking out from behind his shy smile. And here it was. “REEOW!!!” indeed.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Met at 1369 Coffee. Walked down Mass Ave., then back up, then into Rodneys where the deal was basically sealed.
*The PhD student who introduced me to Craigslist became a life-long friend. She even played the piano at the wedding.
Grub Street doesn’t exist any more — as an actual street — and it hasn’t done so for well over a century. But Grub Street has, and still does, exist as a certain kind of ethos. By the time George Gissing wrote New Grub Street in the early 1890s, “Grub Street” stood for “hack writing” — in other words, writing for pay, or writing “to get one’s bread,” as they used to say. Gissing’s novel dramatizes the cultural split between “high culture” and “mass culture” as it tells the story of two very different writers: an idealistic novelist who writes for art’s sake, with very little success, and a cynical journalist who writes for money and as the market dictates. It’s a good novel — and a great example of British naturalism — though I like The Odd Women better.
But the New Grub Street I’m talking about isn’t Gissing’s, it’s Boston’s. The ethos of this Grub Street is a little bit grubby, but the writers there don’t look at their craft as either high or mass culture. They know that it’s both.
Back in 1997, Grub Street started very small, meeting at the Brookline Booksmith. It was so small that in ’98 it moved to the founder’s living room in Somerville. In 2000 they diffused to locations in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge, and in 2002 they centralized again in Somerville. This time they rented space in an old toilet paper factory near Union Square. According to the timeline on their website, without a GPS, they were nearly impossible to find. In 2005, they moved to downtown Boston, and in 2012 they landed in their current location, where I found them.
It’s pretty glorious. The jewel in the crown, perhaps, is the 2013 announcement that Grub Street is leading an initiative to create an official literary district in Boston. It makes sense — their new location once hosted a reading by Charles Dickens, and apparently Edgar Allan Poe was born where the Steinway building currently stands. (And not far, across the street in the common, you can see the new Edgar Allan Poe statue, commemorating the site.)
What you get from Grub Street is an array of different classes, working in all genres and at all levels, from your first personal essay, to how to get your short-stories published, to how to market your books better. And you get a community to talk with, to help you network, and most important of all, to keep you hacking away at your writing.
This past Friday, I took an all-day, Freelance 101 class, because I’d like to figure out whether it’s possible for me to take all the things I’ve learned over lo these many years in academia and share them with a public audience. And maybe get paid. The Freelance class was incredibly informative and exciting. And realistic. There’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into a freelance career, and less certainty than just about any job I can think of, including that of adjunct instructor. (As an adjunct, you’re at least sure there will be a paycheck throughout the semester!)
“Freelance” used to be two words, and it used to mean “mercenary.” Or “sell sword,” in the parlance of George R.R. Martin. One who will hack away, for pay. And indeed, like the cynical journalist in Gissing’s novel, freelance writers hack away for pay. But if pay was all they were after, any freelance you talk to will tell you they’d have gotten into some other field.
The Grub Street philosophy tells us why any of us chooses writing: “Creative writing explores and documents the human condition and creates meaning in the lives of those who practice it. We believe the act of writing can change both ourselves and the world.” And that ain’t gonna be easy.
Whether you’re writing for art or for pay, either way I say you’re a hack writer. You have to be. Writing doesn’t just happen to you because you have fine aesthetic emotions. Writing takes a tremendous amount of work. But work is too pretty a word for the way I often feel when I’m writing. It really is a matter of hacking away at something — sometimes like I’m hacking away at my own brain.
My childhood bedroom, made-over into my mother’s study/the guest bedroom. So, it is my Ohio bedroom. Basically.
I only get back to my mom and dad’s house about twice a year, so by the time the biannual visit rolls around, I feel like I need to go for a lot of days. Because Tim has been freelancing since August, and thus doesn’t need to be at work in any particular place, I thought it would be good for us both to drive to Ohio and spend a whole week.
Throughout the week, we played with our niece and nephew a few times, we visited with friends in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, we talked at length with my parents, and I reconnected with my two sisters and my brother. It was a good trip. It was an emotional trip. History lies heavily between me and each one of the people I saw. But as you can see from below, there was plenty of light to go with the heavy.
I’m posting this collection of random things because it has been far too long since my last posting and it was impossible to get an essay together during this trip (though I did find the time to outline an essay about how I met Tim, so watch for that!) Topics covered here include My Love of Audio Theater, Cats, Pilgrims, and Squid. Something for everyone.
We left on Christmas Eve and returned on New Year’s Eve. It’s about a nine-hour drive, one way. On the way out, we listened to Serial (all 12 episodes); on the way back we listened to Radio Lab. There was so much audio-drama, I began to fantasize about starting up some kind of audio-podcast kind of project myself. I need to figure out the right gear. And I need to find the guts…I got my BA in “Telecommunication Studies,” with an emphasis on radio and audio production so I could, feasibly, pull something together. Who knows!
This is Silver. She is fifteen years old. She is sitting on the big squishy green sofa in my mother’s family room. She is different from any other cat I’ve ever lived with. She’s very pretty, and pretty moody. Her life would make an interesting story.
A family crest that’s been on my Grandma Roth’s dining room wall as long as I can remember. I, perhaps like you, am descended from William Brewster (of the Brewster Islands in the Boston Harbor, and other Brewster things in Massachusetts.) He was a Mayflower pilgrim. Grandma liked to joke that he was the only pilgrim who wore glasses…we all wear glasses, so…haha! I have no idea if this is at all true, but Grandma liked to think it was.
Squidmas, 2014.
Tim and I are mostly vegetarians, but we love seafood. Our Christmas Eve tradition at home (Somerville, Medford, etc.) is to roughly approximate the Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. We go to our nearby Fish Monger (New Deal Fish Market in Cambridge or Fresh Pond Seafood in Arlington); we buy squid (tubes and tentacles) and something else (usually scallops). So, for us, it is the feast of the Two Fishes. We cook em up and put em on fancy pasta. The last two years, we hand-cranked the pasta ourselves (well, Tim did.)
Tim making pasta, Christmas Eve 2013 (Squidmas past)
We brought Squidmas to Ohio this year, and celebrated it on the day after Christmas. I was worried no one would be into it, and I translated this worry into a goofy kind of brag-teasing: “How much squid can I put you down for, hmmm??” “Geeeet ready, you’re eating squid tomorrow!”
We drove far across Mahoning County to Rulli Bros., our area Italian grocer, because we knew they would have the squid. But as we pulled up to the too-empty parking lot, our hearts fell. They are a family-owned business, and they are closed on the day after Christmas. Tim growled, “Well, I’m glad they can do that, because they should be home with their families, but I’m also totally pissed off!” Yeah, me too. Running through a mental list of our squid-free pasta options, I sank lower and lower into the driver’s seat. There has to be squid! I have made such a huge deal about the squid!
We got squid, it was fine. The non-family owned, always-open even-on-Christmas Eve grocery store behemoth down the street had squid. We almost bought octopus, too, but I had no idea what to do with it.
There were Zero leftovers. Squidmas was a total hit, and now, as a family, we’re all thinking up other fish dishes we can make to get us closer to the actual Seven Fishes.
I never forgot how to ride a bike, but I went long enough between rides to raise the question. I hadn’t ridden since I was about fifteen years old or so; not since I learned to drive. One day Tim and I decided that I needed a bike and, as with most things, Craigslist was the place to get one. Tim took care of it, while I nervously waited at home, on the sofa, with our cat, Peanut.
Peanut and I both slouched there, gazing into the middle distance, wondering what I’d gotten myself into this time. Bikes hurt my ass. And there are way too many cars here. This bike is probably going to hurt my ass, I’m going to get distracted, and then I’m going to fall off or something and die. Better to stay here and watch Peanut take a bath.
We heard Tim’s heavy footsteps on the stairs and Peanut hopped down from the sofa to greet him.
Tim stuck his head through the half-opened door. “Come take a look!” he said, and bounded back down the stairs.
I bid Peanut adieu and followed Tim down the back steps to our entirely blacktopped “back yard.” There it was, leaning jauntily against the chainlink: a bright red Columbia Tourist with a wide leather saddle, cruiser-style upright handlebars, and chrome fenders. This was the vintage bicycle of my dreams, and I never even knew it till this moment. Tim was grinning, vibrating with excitement, almost hopping up and down. High fives and hugs, we hopped on our bikes.
The day Tim brought home my red bike coincided with Somerville Open Studios. Open Studios gave us this big bike idea in the first place. First, get me a bike. Then ride all over town, bask in its Somervilleness, look at art, and generally avoid slouching on the sofa gazing into the middle distance with Peanut.
This all went as planned, and I felt pretty damned good throughout. We were riding and running around, popping into little studios, ogling beads and glass and pretty pictures. I was totally comfortable. I rode straight, joining the flow of traffic, coexisting peacefully with the many, many cars. I sighed with relief as the breeze tousled my hair. This is living! This bike is amazing!
We rode over to Highland Street via Porter to look at a jewelry studio. Porter Street surprised me by suddenly turning into a very steep hill. My red bike went faster and faster. The wind that whipped through my hair no longer made me feel happy and free, but rather like a doomed jet plane coming in too fast.
I pumped the back brakes, recalling a story my mother once told me about slamming on her front brakes, flying over her handlebars, and smashing her face into the gravel. This cautionary tale, told to me when I was perhaps seven years old, kept me from ever using my front brakes throughout all of my bike-riding years. But now, as the back brakes squeaked and squealed, my red bike continued to gain momentum. Oh no. I quickly tapped the front breaks, and the bike jerked a bit, but continued to speed up. If you’re careful, I said to myself, you won’t fly over. Just tap them.
I alternated, back brakes, front brakes, back brakes, front brakes. Squeak, Jerk, Squawk, Jerk. “Oh…God! Oh…God!” I was slowing down, but not enough, and at the bottom of the hill was a lot of city traffic. I pumped and held each brake longer and longer, until I had them both gripped flat — Squeal, Jerk, Squeal…Squeeeal…Screeeeeeech… I was screaming right along with the screeching brakes, tears running down my face. The bike was slowing down, but my body didn’t seem to be. My hands were burning from gripping so hard. I am going to fly over these goddamned adorable cruiser-style upright handlebars. There is the bottom of the hill, there are all the many many cars. This will hurt.
But it didn’t. Both the bicycle and I came to a shrieking halt at the bottom of the hill. Tim pulled up next to me, smiling, laughing. He reached out and patted me on the back. I slowly unclenched my teeth, my shoulders, my entire body.
“I never want to do that again,” I whispered. The only thing I wanted was Peanut and the sofa.
As you might imagine, the shrieking brakes were a real red flag. Once off the road, Tim flipped the bike over and we took a closer look. The lines were totally rusted and the brakes themselves liked to stick in place. Later, we took it to the shop, and we got the news: my red bike is both unrideable and unfixable. We determined that neither Tim nor I were savvy enough to make a smart Craigslist bicycle purchase, and we bought a nice new blue-green Raleigh Venture from Park Sales and Service, near Somerville’s Union Square (they sell bikes and sharpen ice skates, too.) This new bike came with a nice wide, cushy saddle. I have ridden it ever since.
But we still have that red bike. At the moment, it leans against the back of our house in Medford. We lock Tim’s Jamis and my Raleigh to it, and hide all three under a big green tarp. We figure for now it makes our working bikes harder to steal, should anyone ever sneak behind our house looking to steal some bikes (two years and counting, this has yet to happen.) And we have DIY bicycle dreams. It’s so damned cute, and it cost fifty bucks. We have to be able to use it for something.
Me with a bike that works–though the seat is totally wrecked. Arlington, MA, Minuteman Bike Trail
Tim and I will either take the Mass Pike to the NY Thruway, with its uniform sequence of rest stops (each with a guaranteed restroom, any time of day), or we’ll take the Pike to 84, to 81 in Scranton (passing through Wilkes-Barre, grazing at its palatial Wegmans), and then pick up 80 and ride that the rest of the way. We won’t see rest stops (what my father has called “road-side rests”) on the level of Ryann Ford’s. Just the same, we like this annual 12-hour drive to Youngstown. We listen to our favorite records, talk for hours and hours, and get to know each other again.
Inhabit Your Town 
