In Boston, my phalanges glaciated, but I have endured more frigid elements in ritualistic initiations of the Boy Scouts. I did, however, buy another jacket while there and layered myself in synthetics and cottons until I was honored as the Michelin Man’s cousin. I boarded several trolly-like trains and felt the squeaky irks and jerks on the subways and buses – a homeless man uttered to me things which I failed to comprehend – I ate across East Asia while in the confines of the old city – and I found that Harvard people stereotypically dress like Harvard people.
I wriggled into about 12 different cramped little mystic shops and felt no more spiritually healed than when I ate a Boston cream doughnut. In a Tibetan shop stuffed between the boundary of two apartment buildings, a woman sat on the floor, surrounded by a dozen singing bowls as a Tibetan man dazzled the woman in reverberations to heal her back pains.
The weirdest ordeal was the disheveled old man who lived in his record shop in a basement below the superficial grounds, which probably housed his stash of colonial remnants of the Plymouth peoples: Records in stacks, stacks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and stacks fallen and stacks dusty and stacks ancient. I found a few shoes and other sundry items hidden in corners and under albums of times past. The old man consistently muttered to himself and aloud as if speaking to all his customers at once, “This place is a mess.”
I said, “We don’t judge.”
And he looked me directly in the eyes and replied with deeply furrowed eyebrows, “You don’t?” He was disgusted that I either lied or lacked a developed palate for judgment.
Among his 30,000 albums, he asked for what we were seeking. I said, “Liz Phair.”
Without hesitation or a moment’s pause to look around, he said, “Nope. But that comes and goes.” How did he know?
Pictures of me and my partner in crime freezing our behinds off in the Boston weather—and this was only November!
Dillon Bolding 