where am I??

Tale of Two Cities?? Hardly. Just another iconic bridge (in Boston; I'm sure you recognize it) on a beautiful, blue-sky day. And Newport's Bridge is bigger, if we want to get comparative/competitive about it, but that's because Newport's Pell Bridge was built to accommodate passage of aircraft carriers, the Navy Base being just north of the bridge. Two aircraft carriers lie moth-balled there to this day ...

In any case, we (Mr. Betty and I) crossed two bridges — at least two bridges — and hung out in Boston on Saturday. And that new bridge (the largest asymmetrical bridge in the world??) is cool, very cool. It's even cooler having the time to stop/pause/view it on foot — from Charlestown, in particular, where we started out (with a quick look-see at Old Ironsides) before taking a ferry named Rita across the harbor, something we hadn't done in ages, as we're usually zipping past/under/through that creepily long tunnel en route to points farther north and feel as if we haven't seen Boston at all ...

But way back when ("way back when ..."), when I was just out of school — at the precise age/stage our son is now — I saw lots of Boston, as I lived there and went everywhere ... on foot. My apartment was in the middle, at the top of a hill, and I didn't hesitate to walk or run, i.e. jog, at any time of day or night — which was pretty stupid — from one end to the other, harbor to Pru, or sometimes across two bridges, my favorite route (at 9 or 10 p.m., solo) being along the Charles to the Mass. Ave. Bridge then back along the opposite shore to the "Salt and Pepper Bridge" near the Science Museum.

It's not so different from what I do now — though I very rarely jog, let alone run — living at the top of another hill in a smaller seaside city. We never really change, do we?? Preferences?? Habits?? Cities, too, remain in essence the same (or so it seems), although Boston looks/feels very different with that new lovely bridge and having buried its traffic issues underground. Still, the two cities (my two cities??) have much in common. The scale may be different — I feel smaller in Boston — but some things are exactly the same ...

About that bridge: it appears it's not the largest asymmetrical bridge in the world. "It is the first asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge in the United States and the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world" (according to the website of Kiewit, the construction outfit who built it). And, in the process of checking (and disproving) my facts, I learned something — the bridge's proper name, for one thing — from Wikipedia: "On 14 October 2002, elephants from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus crossed the new Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge to demonstrate the bridge's structural integrity. The 14 elephants proved that the bridge supports 112,000 pounds. The Boston elephant march resembled tests of the 1800s when bridge engineering was more questionable. Elephants were used to demonstrate the sturdiness of the Eads Bridge in 1874 and the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884. According to folklore, elephants are used for such shows of strength because they are widely believed to have uncanny instincts and will not cross unsafe structures." Now that's interesting ...

slippery slope

In fact, it's not slippery, as the snow has melted and the brick sidewalks are dry (if uneven), but Pelham Street is still a slope ... perhaps my favorite slope. There's just something about the way the hyper-blue harbor spreads itself out at the bottom, especially at sunset, especially in autumn, when monstrous cruise ships loom larger than Goat Island (or so it seems) in the bay.

Pelham also happens to be the first gas-lit street in the United States, if we believe what the sign says (and why wouldn't we??) on the side of the building and bar at the bottom of the hill called "One Pelham East," lest anyone forget the address.

And, gee, I'd never noticed that the sign/plaque itself is lit (or lighted), too ... with electricity??

So, with all those extra-special gas lights that glow so nicely if not so brightly day and night (except the ones that aren't working), isn't it a shame that Pelham is also lined with teetering towering telephone poles and lines criss-crossing like so much electric spaghetti?? Yes and no. There's beauty in function — isn't there?? Folks do live here, we all need power (and parking), the lines do connect us, and it'd surely be difficult and unimaginably expensive to bury everything at this point.

Ah, hindsight ...

I can't help but mention a local artist — I don't know her, but I assume she won't mind — who frequently incorporates telephone poles, lines and the like in her work. Far from including them as minor or unfortunate bits of reality (or ignoring them altogether, as artistic license would allow), she features the lines and fills the resulting patchwork of divided sky with various tones to create a subtle mosaic. But wait, stop, enough ... as I have neither knowledge nor right to describe Dora Atwater Millikin's work, presented not so long ago at a gallery down the hill, bottom of Pelham, take a right, along the cobblestones for a few blocks, unless you're in a car, in which case it's a mite more complicated. She also exhibits up the hill, top of Pelham, beware of tricky bricks and/or parking instructions, left on Bellevue to Spring Bull ...