As we walked up toward Quincy Market, I saw a young man standing on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. I did a double-take, because when I looked at him more closely I saw he was wearing a "Garrigan football" T-shirt. It turned out to be Tony Celaj, the Albanian exchange student who had been at Garrigan last year. While I didn't teach Tony, we were acquainted with each other. I walked up to him and said, "I don't believe who I'm seeing here," and we had a short chat. It turns out that Tony is now attending Bunker Hill Community College and working at a restaurant in Quincy Market. Seeing him in Boston definitely made me believe that it really is a small world.
After Quincy Market, we took the subway to the Aquarium stop on the blue line. We didn't see the Massachusetts State Aquarium, after which the station was named. We did, however, walk along the waterfront--which is still quite industrial, but gradually being gentrified. We probably saw more water in a fountain along the walk than we did in our infrequent glimpses of the harbor.
Just west of the waterfront is a rowhouse neighborhood called "North Boston", where we enjoyed a pleasant walk. The most noteworthy site in the neighborhood is Paul Revere's house. We skipped the admission and just snapped a picture of the exterior. We did go into Sacred Heart Church, formerly called Bethel Chapel. The church was founded in 1833 as a Methodist mission for the seamen, and through its history such literary luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow all worshipped here. In 1871 the church was sold to the Catholics, which used it to serve the area's Italian population. It retains that use today.
Beyond the church, the Italian population was most evident in a plethora of Italian restaurants in North Boston. Most were quite elegant, and all were very expensive. We looked at a variety of menus, but passed on the overpriced food.
The other thing we saw in North Boston was St. Leonard's Peace Garden, a charming little park built to house the decorations that were used when the Pope celebrated mass in Boston in 1979. There's nothing particularly historic about the place, but it's a pleasant, cozy urban space.
The guide books rave about Boston's urban spaces, and this is a place I agree with them. While Margaret and I differed about the first such place we encountered (the treeless plaza by City Hall, where she found the sun oppressive), I think both she and I liked the numerous tiny parks that were scattered throughout the city. Most of the parks are well kept, and they provide pleasant breathing room in what would otherwise be an extremely crowded city.
It was toward the end of rush hour when we headed back to the motel, and the trains were extremely crowded. Although it was late when we got back, our room had not been made up. The beds were un-made, the bathroom hadn't been cleaned, and there were no fresh towels. I went to the office and got some extra towels, and we settled in for the evening.
I read through some of the papers I had acquired during the day (no matter where I travel, I end up bringing home newsprint souvenirs). Both Margaret and I were utterly astounded at the wages and prices in what has to come close to America's wealthiest and most expensive city. The simplest jobs were paying $10 an hour, and salaried positions were rarely advertised below $40,000 per year. That money isn't as good as it might seem, though--given the ridiculous housing costs in Massachusetts. Nothing in the real estate want ads was cheap. Old "fixer-upper" rowhouses started around $150,000, and there was really no ceiling for the prices. Homes probably averaged from $500,000 to $600,000 (keep in mind that most of these are rowhouses), and we saw them as high as $5 million. Rents were equally high. The cheapest studio apartment was $300 a month--precisely what I pay for a two-bedroom here in Algona, and rents as high as $2,500 were not uncommon.
One part of the local economy that surprised me, given the Republican references to "Tax-achusetts", was that sales taxes were not in any way excessive. In the city of Boston, tax is 5%, which is actually less than it is in most of Iowa--and far less than Illinois, New York, or anywhere in Canada. Prices for everyday items were also reasonable; pretty much everything at K-Mart was the same price it would be at home. Even gas was also not out of line--at $1.55 it was about a dime higher than it was back home in Iowa, and a good quarter less than the peak prices we paid here in June.
There was one part of the want ads that was completely different from what you'd see in Iowa. Numerous ads solicited people to be part of scientific research projects. Boston is very much a college town, and almost all of its universities are known for their work in fields like medicine and psychology. We saw ads soliciting people for a study on shyness, ads wanting to study women who were HIV positive, ads looking for people who drank and used cocaine, ads wanting insomniacs, ads looking for convicted drunk drivers, and ads for people who had difficulty remembering things. One ad even requested men who would be willing to have sex in a laboratory setting--anything for science. Almost all the research subjects would be paid for their time--from $50 or $75 for a one-time session to as much as $2,500 for an ongoing study. I have no idea how they go about selecting the subjects, but I'd think it would be interesting (and profitable) to participate in some of those projects. Unfortunately, I have too boring of a life to qualify for most of them.
We had dinner tonight at Bickford's, a restaurant located on the same lot as Motel 6. Bickford's is a chain with sixty restaurants all over New England. It's a lot like Happy Chef or Country Kitchen, but the foods tend toward traditional New England favorites--which means it's the sort of thing that often ends up on the senior menu in the Midwest. Nothing wrong with that, mind you--most of the entrees are good, wholesome, filling food. I had a meat loaf dinner, while Margaret had pot roast. As we left Bickford's, we noticed an ad on their sign board saying that they needed a cook. They were offering a $2,000 signing bonus to whoever agreed to take the position--more insight into the Boston economy.
We returned to our room and relaxed for a while when there was a knock on the door. It was housekeeping. We decided to decline the maid's offer to clean our room at 10pm.
We watched the TV news, where the big story was whether the West Nile virus would be a serious problem in Massachusetts. We also read the local papers. I was amused at the police news, where there were any number of "assault with a dangerous weapon" charges. Rather oddly, though, the most common weapons were not guns and knives, but rather "shod feet". I know kickboxing is becoming a popular sport, but I hardly imagined shoes being classified as "dangerous".
TUESDAY, August 8
Braintree & Plymouth, Massachusetts
Neither Margaret nor I slept at all well last night, and what we woke up to was certainly less than restful. The whole time we were in Braintree, we saw a constant parade of emergency vehicles run past on Union Street. I think there must have been a fire department to the west of our hotel and a hospital to the east. Virtually any time we looked out the motel window, we saw fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars rushing by with their sirens and lights on.
This morning things hit a bit closer to home. We heard sirens close by, looked outside, and saw an ambulance in the hotel parking lot about thirty feet from our room. Before long a fire department paramedic team joined them, then a police car, and finally a trauma ambulance. Whatever was up, the problem appeared to be on the second floor of the hotel, upstairs and down a few rooms from ours. We gawked for a while as anyone would, but before long the emergency vehicles pulled away. I checked the papers and TV news to see if I could find out what was going on, but I never did find out anything. I do hope things turned out okay for the people that were involved.
We didn't go into Boston today. Instead we went to the commuter part of the Braintree "T" station and caught the 9:30 train southward to New England's oldest city: Plymouth, Massachusetts. According to a sign on the platform, we were supposed to buy tickets in advance from a hot dog stand in the station. I knew, however, that tickets were also for sale on the train, with a $1 surcharge. Before long the train stopped, and we got on board. Rather oddly the conductor never asked us for a ticket or offered to sell us one. We ended up riding all the way from Braintree o Plymouth (about a 45-minute trip) for free.
Plymouth's train station is located at Cordage Park, a shopping mall that is housed in a former rope factory (hence the name cord-age). The platform is located directly behind a Wal-Mart that looks like it ought to be historic.
It is over three miles from Cordage Park to downtown Plymouth. A circulator bus (actually one of the city bus routes for a neighboring city) connects the two, but when we arrived there were no buses anywhere in sight. It was a very hot day as we started walking down the street toward town. Eventually (about halfway to downtown) one of the buses caught up with us, and we got aboard. Today must have been our lucky day, when it comes to transit fares. It is supposed to cost $.75 to ride GATRA (the transit buses from Greater Attleboro), but today only some bank was subsidizing the fares. They'd covered over the farebox, and all rides were free.
We got off the bus at the post office in downtown Plymouth and then set off to see the town. First we happened upon Leyden Street, named after the town in Holland where the Pilgrims came from (you'll recall from history that they went from England to Holland before coming to America) and site of the original Plymouth settlement. At the foot of Leyden Street is Plymouth Rock and the beach where the Pilgrims first set foot on the North American mainland.
Guide books describe Plymouth Rock as disappointing and unimpressive, but this was an important place for me. Some families get teary-eyed over seeing Ellis Island or the Statue of Liberty, but there's no personal connection for me among the immigrants who came through New York Harbor. Here in Plymouth I really felt connected to my ancestors. It was a thrill to look out over the rocky shore and think that this was where William Bradford, John Alden, and Priscilla Mullins stepped off the Mayflower.
There is a reason the books call the rock itself disappointing. Under a massive Greek revival canopy sits a relatively tiny boulder with the number "1620" carved on its top. A charming old lady from the park service told us its history. The original Plymouth Rock (which probably wasn't the actual Pilgrim landing site, but was on the beach where they landed) was about four times the size of what is there today. In the 1740s an old man identified it as the place he had been told the Pilgrims had landed, and it became important in the Revolution as a symbol of the unique American culture. In the 1800s, large parts of the rock were carved up. The city of Plymouth gave a chunk of the original rock to every city in America that had named itself "Plymouth". Parts of the rock were placed in museums (we would see one up close later on today), while others were sold off as souvenirs. Only in the mid 1900s did people recognize the need to protect the rock. By that point it had shrunk to its present size, and the city built an enclosure to protect what was left of it. The woman obviously hears complaints about the rock from lots of underwhelmed tourists. She seemed both apologetic and annoyed about this. She noted, though, that the story of Plymouth Rock includes the story of its use and misuse by Americans over the years. What is there today shows reminds us not only of the Pilgrim landing, but also of those who have been to this site since then.
Just down the beach from Plymouth Rock is Mayflower II, a 1950s re-creation of the ship the Pilgrims sailed on. We paid our admission and stepped aboard. While exact facts about the Mayflower's construction are lost to the ages, they've done a pretty good job of creating as authentic of a ship as they could--using the construction techniques of the 17th Century. It was absolutely amazing to me how small the Mayflower was. The Pilgrims were essentially considered cargo on the ship, and they were jammed below deck for weeks on the journey to America. The conditions were not far above what you read about slave ships being like. You get an insight into the depth of their religion when you see the conditions they willingly endured for the right to worship as they saw fit.
I had joked with Margaret about this before, but while we were at the Mayflower a song kept running through my head. It was John Bunyan's "He Who Would Valiant Be", the first hymn written in America from Pilgrim's Progress in 1684. We sang this song at the funeral for Brian Sullivan, Margaret's late husband. In the archaic language of the 1600s it expresses the Puritan beliefs that brought our ancestors to these shores and challenges us to live up to their example:
'Gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy
Follow the master.
There's no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound,
His strength the more is.
No foes shall stay his might;
Though he with giants fight,
He will make good his right
To be a pilgrim.
Since, Lord, thou dost defend
Us with thy Spirit,
We know we at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies, flee away!
I'll fear not what men say,
I'll labor night and day
To be a pilgrim.
We walked back to the Main Street and had lunch at a place whose business cards said "Jubilee!, doing business as the Corner Deli". We each had a soup and sandwich combo. My sandwich was ham and cheese on an absolutely flavorless rye bread. The salad, however was excellent, with an outstanding fruit vinaigrette.
After lunch we wandered south through downtown Plymouth. Our next stop was the Old Court House, which dates to Revolutionary times. There's a small local museum inside, and we looked around the place quickly. The courthouse is one of three main buildings around a small town square, the other two being the oldest churches in town. It was amazing to see the one and only place that has the right to call itself "First Church of America". The classic white New England steeple-topped church is actually the third building on the site--this one dating back only about 200 years. The congregation, however, has met in exactly this place ever since that first winter in 1620. The church was, of course founded by Puritans as a Congregational church (the forerunner of the United Church of Christ, of which I am a member today). At the beginning of the 19th Century the congregation voted to change to Unitarianism (the same faith that worshiped at Unity Temple, where Margaret and I attended a dreadful Christmas Eve service in Chicago two years ago). When the change happened, a large group of members separated from the original church and started Pilgrimage Church (the third main building on the square), which remains Plymouth's main Congregational church to this day. It was fascinating to see these buildings. My church is the oldest in Algona, and we are rightly proud of nearly 150 years of local history. However, that seems like absolutely nothing compared to the fantastic religious history on this square.
Behind the two churches is one of the oldest cemeteries in the New World, a place called simply "Burial Hill". The cemetery is still in use, and in places you can see ten or more generations of the same families resting side by side. The contrast between the old slim tombstones of the early days of our country and the stouter stones we use today really stands out.
Our family history was lying on burial hill. To quickly abbreviate all the work Paul put together, Margaret and I (and Steve and John and Paul) are the children of Elizabeth Miller Burrow, who was the daughter of Edna May Pratt Miller Fishel. Edna was the daughter of Dora Adell Feakins Pratt, the daughter of Hawley Giles Feakins, the son of Catherine Alden Feakins. Catherine was the daughter of William Henry Allen, Jr., the son of Temperance Noyes Allen, the daughter of Sybil Whiting Noyes, the daughter of Elizabeth Bradford Whiting. Mrs. Whiting was the daughter of Samuel Bradford, the son of William Bradford, Jr., who was in turn the son of Governor William Bradford who was born in 1589 at Austerfield, Yorkshire, England. A large obelisk stands on Burial Hill with these words:
rest the ashes of
WILLM BRADFORD
a zealous puritan
Gov. of Ply. Col. from
April 1621 to 1657
(the year he died
aged 69)
except 5 yrs.
which he declined
We found a few other historic graves, and a few names that might conceivably have been distant relatives--though not ones we could prove. The other Mayflower voyagers from which we know we are descended are John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, whose graves are unmarked but probably are not far from the hotel where we stayed in Braintree. There is actually one more generation in that lineage: Charles Whiting (Elizabeth's husband) was the son of Hannah Rogers, the daughter of Elizabeth Peabody Rogers, the daughter of Elizabeth Alden Peabody, who was the daughter of John and Priscilla. The Aldens have been called the "founders of a nation", because today more than three million Americans are descended from them. The weekend before we were in Boston, the Alden descendents held their annual reunion in Duxbury--the ancestral home. It would be fascinating to go to one of those sometime. By comparison, all the relatives I see only every couple of years at the Miller reunions would seem positively close.
Our last stop in downtown Plymouth was a jump forward in time: Cranberry World. Southeast Massachusetts is the home of Ocean Spray, the cooperative that is synonymous with cranberries. Just down the street from Plymouth Rock they have their visitors' center, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to (and far more) about the little red fruit. The displays were interesting, and the air conditioning was most welcome on a very hot afternoon. We also enjoyed sampling cup after cup of various mixed fruit concoctions.
We waited downtown for a while and eventually caught a bus back to Cordage Park (again free of charge). There was quite a bit of time to kill before the train left, so we went into Wal-Mart and had soft drinks at a "McDonalds Express" right there in the store. (I still have my Pedro Martinez souvenir cup, saluting the Red Sox lone good player.) It intrigued me that here in this most Anglo-Saxon of American towns, most of McDonalds' employees were Hispanic. In fact, Plymouth as a whole came across as more ethnically diverse than Boston.
We took the train back to Braintree. This time the conductor quickly came around, and we paid about three bucks each for passage back northward. We got back to the Motel 6 around 5pm, and the maid had just finished doing our room (the cart was outside the room next door).
We rested at the motel for a while and then walked to one of the nearby strip malls. We intended to have dinner at Chili's--a Mexican chain--but they had a long wait for seating. Instead we opted for Tennessee BBQ, which looked like a fast food place, but was more like a cafeteria. They served heaping portions of tasty ribs and chicken, complete with all the requisite country fixings. The place is apparently a local chain, and they really do serve wonderful food.
Back at the hotel we watched "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". I'm addicted to the show, but this was apparently the first time Margaret had watched it straight through. We also enjoyed some cranberry cocoa I had picked up in Plymouth. Then we settled off in our beds for what would prove to be a much more restful night than the one before.
CONTINUED IN PART 4
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