Boston

I am home alone on Good Friday. I do not have dinner plans. I do not have a morning meeting. This next 18 hours is the down time portion of my trip to the US—the longest open space in two weeks.

I am weary, wrung out, and I am very filled with the delights of being here. I have not gone to my favorite second-hand clothing stores. I have not bought any new shoes or new earrings. It is cold and looks like it may snow again and I’m wrapped in cashmere and eating chocolate covered candied ginger from the Scheffenberger chocolate store in San Francisco.

The joys of Boston are not in the weather, and thus far they have not been in the urban experience. These joys have been in conversation after conversation with smart people that I like and admire. I have talked about the nature of God, about shifting identities, about how we might teach people to be more compassionate, more curious. These joys are in being with people who know my past, who think my kids are shockingly big in the pictures, who remember when I was pregnant. These are the joys of being at one of the world centers of intellectual power and meeting with the people who write the books that shape people’s thinking over the long haul. These are the joys of feeling my feet firm under me and knowing which way to look when I cross the street.

These last two days I have talked with extraordinary people who have made and are making a difference in the world. I’ve had former professors treat me as colleagues, and I’ve had big time book editors take me seriously. And I’ve taken myself seriously, talking about my thinking and my ideas with a variety of brilliant and potentially awe-inspiring people. And I’ve seen streets I know like the back of my hand, have not felt turned around or confused about where I am, and have felt myself in some deep way at home.

I ran into a former student in the street who treated me like a rock star and said beautiful things about me. I ran into a friend from Naomi’s preschool who is now a masters student at Harvard. I dropped in on a former mentor from my master’s program who looks almost exactly as she did 16 years ago when I first met her.

Yesterday, after a delightful conversation with Bob about his career and mine, his thinking and mine, I walked through Longfellow Hall, the center of my grad school experience and the place where I’ll teach on Monday (oops, guess I should practice that a few more times—there goes my free 18 hours!). There was a retrospective series of bulletin boards about the Harvard Educational Review, the journal on whose editorial board I sat for two years. I looked through the pictures—serious young white men in the first pictures, finally with a somber white woman or two as time went on, and then to the multi-colored, diverse boards of my time (funny to see the old pictures of white people in black and white and the color pictures of people of all different colors). Most of the newer pictures were of boards doing silly things—hamming it up for the camera. As I do not ham, I did not particularly look to see my face. And yet, there it was, hammy, even, a picture from our last night as officers, 6 women dressed in black velvet, draped with feather boas and dancing. And one of those was me.

Telling this story at dinner with Jim last night, before I described the picture in any way he wondered, “Was that the night you got drunk?” Well, yes it was. The only night in my whole Ed Review experience where I had perhaps one glass too many (which would be two glasses of wine altogether). We laughed about that night, about his remembering of that night, about the decade we have been friends.

Boston is a lovely city. Spring is slowly emerging—daffodil heads and snow drops are in bloom and the tulips are budding. The places I have been—Harvard Square, the South End, Newton, Brookline—are gracious and lovely places, with old, brick Victorian townhouses, the occasional Revolutionary War-era single family home, turn-of-the-century grand apartment buildings. And I feel myself already out of touch with the rhythms of nature, the shape of the wind, the phase of the moon. I love it here. And I miss the beach and the hills and Michael and the kids.

So, I find myself weary and revved up. I have not slept six hours in a night for a week. And I have not had so many hours of good conversations in a row in as long as I can remember. The pulls of this place are as expected as the pulls of New Zealand, and the downsides just as clearly anticipated. Somehow the foresight of knowing these pulls doesn’t make them pull any less, though. How many life changes do we get to make in this lifetime? How many identities do we get to hold at one time? How do we balance the impossible things we wish were possible? Let’s see how I live my way through that one.