EAST MONTPELIER — Both my friend Bea and I have functioning automobiles, which is fortunate, because we live (when you factor in stops for coffee, washroom, or gasoline) about four hours apart. We pretty much trade weekends for travel, and get together about twice a month. She’s still teaching, so vacations are a pretty big deal. Almost as good are three-day weekends. This past weekend was one of those bonuses, thanks to Patriots’ Day, now celebrated in about five states, and especially in hers. It was my turn to go to her house by the sea on Broad Sound in Nahant, Mass.; so Friday just past noon Kiki and I climbed into Batty, our current ride, and headed down the interstate toward what I feared might turn out to be a very busy and hectic travel day.
I needn’t have fretted. Traffic was, if anything, lighter than usual. Even a dreaded seven-mile-long stretch of I-95 as we neared our goal moved pretty smartly along. A little before five we hit the divided highway on the causeway leading out to Bea’s sort-of-an-island sanctuary and shortly after were each relaxing: Kiki sniffing around the premises for the cottontail rabbits that thickly populate the place, and Bea and I catching up on a couple of weeks of pent-up conversation. You can well imagine that the day’s New York Times and Boston Globe, open on the kitchen table between us, provided plenty of material for a lively discourse. I almost wish we didn’t agree on so many things. It might be even livelier.
She was still decompressing from a hectic week (think government cuts to programs vital to her school’s research), so I fed Kiki her evening rations and Bea and I supped quietly at a seafood restaurant located providentially only a mile and a quarter away, where diners have a choice of two large sports channel TVs or the tide rising or falling on the broad beach outside. The tide was just past high. The lights along the shore a mile or so away to the west bobbed and danced on the waves. Very relaxing.
The wind next day was strong enough to tumble furniture around on the covered porch, but the lingering April chill was gone at last; so we did what almost everybody there seems to do when they can: We went for a walk on the beach. Kiki, freed from the confines of the house and her bed in the back of Batty, zoomed around the sudden vast Sahara looking for unwary gulls. She doesn’t know that there are no such things. Then home for a snack and off to the home of some good friends for an Easter ham supper. More great conversation, a staring contest between Kiki and a large cat, and the promise of a hambone next day for Bea’s pea soup recipe.
We drove into Boston next morning. I declined the honor of driving. Boston is for me too haunted by the ghosts of Tazio Nuvolari, Juan Fangio, and Stirling Moss, all driving Honda Civics. But there was something different that day, a hint of friendly cooperation. We lunched high in a Georgian brownstone in Back Bay with old friends of Bea’s who obviously had been having the same conversation we’d had on Friday, and needed to share their concerns with other sets of ears. Say what you want about Donald Trump, he’s given us enough fodder for 10 years of fraught conversations. We sipped slivovitz. Then came the treat of the day: matzah flour pancakes dusted with cinnamon and sugar and topped with Vermont maple syrup.
From the brownstone, the three of us walked just a couple of blocks to a pedestrian bridge over (I think) Storrow Drive, and down past the band shell to a bench by the river. Not only was it a holiday weekend, but the day before the Boston Marathon. The town was packed, everybody enjoying warm sunshine at last. Kiki looked a little shell-shocked and jumpy; people, cars, dogs everywhere. She’d just had a haircut and a deodorizing, so she got a lot of admiring smiles and greetings.
Then I noticed that almost everyone around us, and there were hundreds, seemed jolly. If I just nodded at someone we met on the path or the bridge, I got a smile and a “How’s it goin’?” A crowd of runners went by, probably a couple hundred. Bea asked what was going on. They were warming up for the Marathon the next day. We sat on a bench by the river. I asked a young mother with a stroller and a kid if she’d take our picture. Of course she would. She was from Austin, Texas. Her husband was running the next day. She’d run it in 2022. Now it was his turn.
Boston, for this weekend of celebrating Revolutionary patriots and an athletic tradition, felt like one big, happy Irish family. I remembered Robert Frost’s line: “…given my heart a change of mood, and saved some part of a day I had rued.”
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
