Boston in Cigarettes

BOSTON, SOMERVILLE

August 2004 – October 2011

Once, there was a silver seashell. It lived on a sun-porch in Jamaica Plain. Often, three women would visit the silver seashell. One by one, in pairs, or all together, the women would sit. Sometimes they would talk, but not always. But they would always smoke, and then they would stab the silver seashell with burning cigarettes.

Over and over and over.

The illustrator, who loved to draw the human anatomy (especially teeth), would stab the silver seashell with American Spirits. The graphic designer and the literary critic, apparently more colonial in their tastes, stabbed it with Parliaments. The literary critic was really a graduate student learning to be a literary critic. She was home in the day quite often and terribly nervous. She stabbed the silver seashell most of all.

The seashell was large and its silvery shimmer was spray-painted. The women sat, filling it and filling it with burning cigarettes, all the year round. Even in winter, when noreasters would fill the sun-porch up to the windows with snow.

The illustrator and the graphic designer were natives of Massachusetts and had been friends since college. The literary critic was new. She’d answered their advertisement. In their initial interview, the graphic designer showed the literary critic the sun-porch and said,

“We like to come out here, smoke some butts…”

The literary critic smiled knowingly, though she thought the designer had said “buds,” and she quickly began to calculate the extent to which she cared about living with habitual drug users. In two bats of the eye she decided she didn’t. It was a huge apartment on a lovely, tree-lined cul-du-sac in a hip neighborhood. And there was this sun-porch for smoking things with people who didn’t mind if you did. Later the three women laughed together about quirky regionalisms, like “butts,” “bubbler,” and “packy,” and the zany misunderstandings they often caused.

The literary critic had been smoking cigarettes for over ten years, ever since she was fourteen years old. Back then, it was anything she could get two fingers around, but when she found a gas-station attendant willing to play dumb and take her buck-eighty, she always ordered Marlboro Lights.

“Hard pack.”

In those days, she’d walk her block, find a hiding place, smoke and feel like James Dean. Later, she’d drive around town, smoking and singing. Her favorite song to sing was the Toadies “Possum Kingdom,” and she would always belt along: “Do You Wanna Die?”

The critic, then, was seventeen. The dark humor of this scene did not strike her. At the time.

The car she had at twenty-two was old, and one day its power windows stopped rolling down. So she popped the sun roof and filled her ashtray to overflowing. All future cars, she resolved, would have the manual windows you cranked down yourself.

But that was not Boston in cigarettes. She smoked a lot in those days, but in Boston it seemed she smoked constantly.

It may have happened anyway, but two dramatic events prompted the critic to inhabit the sun porch alongside the silver seashell. She had lived in Jamaica Plain for less than a week when her grandfather passed away. She returned from whence she came. She arrived at her boyfriend’s house.

“I just said goodbye to you,” he said, failing to conceal his irritation.

Back in JP after the funeral, the boyfriend broke up with her over the phone. Both cruel and cliche. There she sat: cell phone, sun porch, cigarettes, seashell. And there she stayed, for hours and hours, smoking and crying. And once school started, on the sun porch she could study while she smoked without ceasing. Away from the sun porch, she entered into the “every fifteen minutes” phase of life.

Once she met the man who would become her husband, she tried to cool it. Fortunately for her, he was a devotee of rock clubs, and he was understanding–a lot of people he knew and liked were smokers. She almost never smoked around him. But once apart, she would return to the sun porch–six in a row for the silver seashell.

As the relationship grew more serious, she tried to cut back. Once engaged, she quit. But her arms and legs grew great rashy flames in protest. (Nicotine tricks the body. It makes the body think that without nicotine, the body can’t survive.)

Once married, the critic’s attention returned to graduate school, comprehensive exams, confusion, frustration. She began to fantasize about fancy clove cigarettes, long, sleek cigarette holders, and abalone-encrusted cigarette cases. She would peruse these fanciful products online. And then one day she bought some clove cigarettes. She started smoking again.

She lived in Somerville near Harvard now. The seashell and sun porch were long gone. She sat on the stoop and just blatantly littered the sidewalk with cigarette ends. She got to know each of her neighbors this way. A near constant presence on the stoop. Or so it must have seemed to them.

But the every-fifteen-minutes phase was long past. From the first clove cigarette, for a period of five years she tried to keep herself to under six cigarettes a day. She took up collage. She played scrabble with herself. She did a lot of online shopping. She learned that Parliaments burn too quick, leaving her wanting more. She learned that American Spirits burn far longer, and she could have just one.

In October, 2011, two days after her husband was laid off and six months before she would defend her dissertation, the critic lit a cigarette as she waited for the bus. And then she made a ludicrous decision.

“Yeah. That’s gonna be the last one.”

And, more or less, it was.

A few years back, a student had complained on a course evaluation that they’d seen her smoking before class. The critic decided to find places to smoke out of sight. Shortly before this particular October day, she’d spent about fifteen minutes looking for a solitary smoking spot. No one’s got time for that.

And then, there was the breathing. Breathing felt gray. She felt gray before, she felt grayer after, and she felt gray during, which really obviated the whole enterprise. It was like she could feel the shit killing her.

So she stopped.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

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Powderhouse sq, Somerville, MA

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My Red Bike

SOMERVILLE, MA

July 2007

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’s Hubway Adventure

MEDFORD, SOMERVILLE, CAMBRIDGE, BOSTON

and back again

Hubway bike sharing

Tim’s bicycle has a broken axle. He bought it when he was 23, when he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey back in the spring of 2000. The bicycle before that was purchased the previous summer, in Delaware. It traveled with him–first to Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed for one month in late summer ’99, then to New Brunswick, where he stayed a bit longer, for basically the whole ’99-2000 school year. Somewhere in there, Tim left that bicycle under a tree in the side yard of the blue split-level colonial where he lived with five other twenty-somethings. The bike got stolen. He replaced it with a black Jamis, which he has ridden ever since — until the day he crossed the railroad tracks near Kendall Square in Cambridge and busted the axle.

Though Tim is a freelance editor today, he used to be a math teacher, and before that he worked raising money for environmental causes. After graduating from college, Tim took a job as canvas director for the Fund for Public Interest Research. He would travel from town to town setting up canvas offices and deploying teams of college students to knock on doors, raising money for things like Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign. He worked for the Massachusetts bottle bill his first summer (a new version of which just failed…again). He had a big win the year his bike was stolen: he helped protect about 90 million acres of national forests from the logging industry.

Tim is tall and thin with light, wavy brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile that digs deep into both cheeks. Though he looked younger than most of the college students on his team, for as long as he was in town he was an effective manager, running things with an air of good humored sincerity.

His work involved a lot of hustle and bustle, but he also spent a lot of time alone. When the kids were canvasing, Tim would canvas too, walking miles all alone, knocking on doors, sometimes getting donations, sometimes not. On these jobs, there was plenty of time to think — he would, for example, theorize the correlation between the outward appearance of a house, the likelihood of donation, and if they gave, how much. He once told me about how on his rare nights off in West Hartford, he’d stop at a nearby used bookstore, buy a paperback and read the whole thing in a night. This reminded me of the time he fell asleep under a tree near Spy Pond (Arlington, MA) while reading Kafka’s short stories. A solitary but contented man.

On our second date, in the spring of 2005, I saw him crumple his water bottle up into a little ball and stick it in his pocket to recycle at home. I thought that was so weird, I fell in love a little. I soon learned, Tim does not just throw things away. His bike is a prime example. A couple of years ago, when we brought our bikes in for their annual April checkup, Tim and the bike guy shared a little moment, laughing at how long the old Jamis had been hanging on. A few years before that, Tim noticed with chagrin that someone had stolen his bike seat and replaced it with a lesser model. This seat tips up and down and is generally a pain in the ass. I have suggested that he go buy himself a proper seat at least once a year for the last eight years. “Eh…it’s fine,” he says. “Now it’s rusted in place!”

But, this past August, the axle broke. The Jamis is currently unrideable. Fortunately, Hubway exists, and it is right in line with Tim’s sensibilities. It’s a bike-sharing program with bike stations all over the greater Boston area. There are annual and monthly memberships, or you can get a 24 or 72 hour pass — you swipe your credit card at the Hubway kiosk and you can ride as many times as you want within the time-frame you select. You just can’t go over 30 minutes a ride.

The day before I wrote Smoot Bridge, I got the urge to ride my bike over there. I used to ride across the bridge every day, but it had been years and I wanted to recapture the feeling. For a tense moment, we thought I would have to do this alone…the Jamis’s axle is broken, after all. But then we remembered Hubway. Tim decided to do the 24 hour pass. If he could switch bikes in under 30 minutes, he could get away with paying only $6. Challenge accepted.

We walked from our house to the Tufts Hubway station and grabbed the first bike. Being the first one, this transaction took the longest. We rode from Tufts, down to Mass Ave, and through Harvard Square. We heard the noontime bells ringing, and Tim realized he only had 7 minutes to return his first bicycle. I was totally oblivious to this. He charged up Mount Auburn and Mass Ave, on the lookout for any sign of Hubway. He found a station at the Central Square Post Office, with only a couple minutes to spare.

He had a little trouble with this one, because the original 30 minutes wasn’t up yet. For a second, he thought he’d misread the website and he’d be stuck bikeless in Central Square. Once the 30th minute arrived, he tried again and was immediately given his next bike. He figures either the time was an issue, or the kiosk needs a couple of minutes to recognize that the bike is back. (here’s a word from Hubway about what happened.)

We kept riding down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, where I stopped to take some pictures for the blog. Tim didn’t say anything, but he knew the pictures were going to make it difficult to get to another Hubway station in time. He thought he could make it once we got going across the bridge, but, as he rode out to the patch of Esplanade across from the Lagoon, he realized that I had disappeared.

In fact, I had stopped as soon as I got down to the Esplanade from the bridge. The sailboats were looking perfect and I wanted a picture. I tried to call after him, but he was way out of earshot. Once we met back up, everything was swell until, on the foot bridge at Mass General, Tim realized he had 2 minutes to find a Hubway station. I was in mid-sentence when he realized this. “Time’s almost up! Gotta go! Gotta go!”

Tim’s Hubway Adventure was truly excellent. He may try it again some time, but he wishes we had a station closer to our house. We both feel lucky to live somewhere with a service like this, but we both love our own bikes. I asked him what he wanted to to do about his, fully expecting that at long last he would agree to replace it with a new bike. I don’t know what I was thinking. The Jamis isn’t going anywhere.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Hubway Adventure Route!

Tim on a bike path in Wales, holding bikes that look exactly like ours…yet which are not.

My Meow Mile

SOMERVILLE, MA

The Meow Mile: October 12, 2014, 10:30 am
Between Davis Square and Union Square

Some fifty of us clustered around the starting line, where the Minuteman Bike Path intersects Willow Ave. If you drove by that day, you probably noticed the crowd; then you probably noticed the abundance of runners wearing fluffy cat ears. I didn’t have a pair; it never even occurred to me to get one. But, of course, once I saw them I was tremendously jealous of the ear people. In cat ears or not, we were all gathered to “run, walk, and pounce” a 5K in support of the Charles River Alley Cats and the Gifford Cat Shelter. The organizers were all in high spirits at the turnout, despite falling short of their fundraising goal. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. You can raise money with every step you take, so with luck, smartphones, and a lot of stepping, the goal will be within reach. (You can search and select any shelter you want to support, including both Gifford Shelter and Charles River Alleycats — it’s really easy.)

The cat ears are all the more necessary because there is an Official High-Five/Fist-Bump for the Meow Mile. It is performed as follows:

Face each other. High-Five (as normal.)

Immediately, Fist-Bump and then Lick Your Fist (or pretend to.)

Finish by Rubbing Licked Fist against Forehead in One Circular Motion.

You see now how the cat ears really make the whole thing. But we can imagine we have cat ears, can’t we? Yes we can. from pixabay.com

My partner Tim and I like to do local 5K walk/runs because they serve as a sort of “exercise event” in our lives — something we can go out and do together on a weekend morning that lets us interact with the town. We like things like this because they make us feel like we live here, and are not in fact a nation of 2. But we were really looking forward to the Meow Mile because the Gifford Cat Shelter introduced us to Iris and Lateegra. One and Two Years Old, respectively, both Iris and Lateegra were found at feeding stations that both the Gifford Shelter and the Charles River Alleycats maintain. Both organizations watch over feeding stations and — quite heroically, I think — round up stray and feral cats, determine which have been socialized (and are thus “adoptable”), which are feral, neuter/spay all of them, and then either relocate the adoptable cats to a no-kill shelter or return the feral cats to their colonies. You can find out more about how feral cat colonies work and the positive effects of catch-neuter/spay-return at the Charles River Alleycat website. Feral cats are pretty fascinating.

Before setting out, Tim had studied the map. He showed me, told me the turns. I half listened, assuming there would be signs or volunteers along the route to tell me which way to go. I glanced at the map, got the general shape. Then the race began.

I’m working up to running races, and so for this one I embraced the option to “walk/run.” Tim ran — he’s pretty seasoned, and he was the first one out. He never wins, but he likes to best himself. It was a gorgeous day; one of those cloudless blue days, just crisp enough to make you glad it’s October. I sniffed the autumn air and let the faster people pass me by. Along the way, I saw some places I’d forgotten that I loved since moving from Somerville to Medford: Hub Comics at Bow St. and Walnut, where I bought my first Moomin; and Highland Kitchen, where we celebrated my dissertation defense.

I knew that Tim would be finished in half the time it took me; when I was in the home stretch, I broke into a run. The walkers were clustering together and moving too slow for me (If I’m walking, I want to walk really fast.) I darted across the finish line and Fist Bump-Face Washed with Tim. He complemented me on my time; indeed, his was half as long. “You’re not gonna believe this,” he said, with a sheepish look on his face. “Oh my god, you won, didn’t you?” He nodded. As usually happens, faster runners pulled ahead of him. But apparently none of them had paid attention to the map.

Iris and the magic oven mitt.

Lateegra, inhabiting the writing room window.

Meow Mile Map

 

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze