485days

“Find your family by joining ours.”

She sits at the corner table in the 80 degree sun, clutching a lime green winter down jacket to match her T-shirt, reading aloud from a New England Historical Genealogical Society brochure she picked up two addresses down. “Well, my last name is . . .” On she rambles, switching between a verbatim recitation of the brochure’s contents and personal commentary.

Her voice rises to a shrill holler that causes everyone else at the café tables to fear they’ve suddenly been drawn into a one-sided conversation. “FOR AS LOW AS $89.99 A MONTH. For $100 a month I can join your family?” She rattles off every variation in pricing, says she’ll put the pamphlet back. But instead she goes on in a Southern drawl, “All I have to do is sign the application—I betcha there’s an online- Yep, bet I can enter a credit card online.”

“I got friends. $150. That could be anybody. Aaannnyybbody for $150.” She repeats her last name a final time, as if a Genealogical Society employee was about to start issuing her information from the folds of the brochure. “I’ll put this back. Americanancestors.org,” she says it for memory, says it like some sort of flying banner advertisement for the sake of the café’s sun-soaking customers, and takes off down the street, still reciting aloud pricing options, benefits of membership, historical facts, until her voice trails off down the street.

638days

“Walk sign on CROSSING Berkeley, Berkeley.”

“Walk sign on CROSSING Berkeley, Berkeley.”

“Walk sign on CROSSING Berkeley, Berkeley.”

I want to strangle the brilliant grammatician who wrote the script.

Maybe drown the halfwit in Boston government who decided the city had the funds to install this sound torture in a randomly selected assortment of Boston’s streetlights.

And the salesman who talked the suburban world, and, somehow, the city of Boston, into these monotone-speaking traffic lights with voices originally recorded for the purpose of Argentinean torture chambers in the serpentine depths of benign-looking garages? I want to tie him to one of his own bleating crosswalk signs until he begs to cross the street against the warning beeps tuned to the sounds of a dying hospital patient.

“Walk sign on CROSSING Berkeley, Berkeley.”

“Walk sign on CROSSING Berkeley, Berkeley.”

Five nights a week. And as I stand there staring down the walk sign on Boylston, I will never need to cross Berkeley. But I almost do, every night, only to cross back over at the next block, just to escape that voice.

“Walk sign on CROSSING Berkeley, Berkeley.”

673days

“WWWAAATTERRRRR ICE WWWAAATTERRRRR ICE!”

He was already upset when we got out here. Blanket? No. Teddy? No. Bunny? No. Some mysterious item left behind, five floors up – for all I know he thought he could bring his giant foam caterpillar to school. The one he spent all of last night riding until it broke down, yelling, “Oh, no!” until I replaced the fly-away wheels . . . and repeat. Or maybe he just forgot to say goodbye to his train. Or his uncarved pumpkin.

And now he’s thrown his water bottle – smashed it open on the brick.

“WWWAAATTERRRR ICE!”

We’re already late for school, and I have no intention of lugging 30 pounds of howling “WATER ICE” back up five flights of stairs.

And so it’s “WWWAAATTERRRR ICE!” down five blocks of the Back Bay. I’m practically running, and every streetlight is an eternity. And an opportunity to give Charlie another lecture, reminding him that he threw the water cup in the first place, that water and ice don’t just spout out of street corners for his benefit, that he can have all the water he wants once he gets to school. I know he can’t hear me over the “WWWAAATTERRRR ICE!” but I’m not really talking to him anyways. I’m talking to the side glances and stares, I’m rehashing the story for each 30 seconds of daily commute ruined, I’m intercepting their accusing glares, keeping their fingers off the button for some call center, the place where you report mothers who deprive their children of “WATER ICE.”

708days

They thought they’d placated her with the pond photo. She’s already sizing it for Instagram, thinking how good she looks in her striped turtleneck sweater dress and gold designer sandals next to her sister’s tourist uniform of shorts and basic tee. She’s applying filters to the scene that’s less duck pond than sorority squats and “skinny arms,” elbows jutting at odd angles to pouting lips and tossed back heads. Meanwhile, her brother, sister, and father sneak away to a nearby bench to dig into their Cheesecake Factory carry-out containers.

“OH MY GOD. You guys are already eating your cheesecake?”

She snaps pictures for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, her mother. She stands in front of them, waiting for likes, contemplating the plebeian family before her. She wants to go to Urban Outfitters.

“There’s no way I’m going to find that.”

“God, dad, you’re such an idiot. You just MapQuest it.”

The cheesecake eating continues. No one makes a move to stand.

“I barely got to go school shopping. I think I deserve an outfit.”

“Listen to your whiny voice.”

“Dad, you’re so annoying.”

“We’re not going.”

“Fine. I’m going. And you’re carrying this.” Cheesecake Factory bag and Longchamp fly from the girl’s wrist into her father’s lap. She storms across the park in the opposite direction of Urban Outfitters. With no purse, no money, and a dumbstruck family fumbling with cheesecake containers and shopping bags in her wake.

715days

“Where’d’ya get that, Dad? Did you buy that?” The old man nods as his son looks in disdain at the éclair on his plate. He points to his own plate.

“This is a CROISSANT, Dad. Buttery. Delicious. They even have these at McDonald’s in France.”

The large travelling man in too-short shorts knows everything about this café and the café that used to be here, and he breaks into a lecture for his hearing-deficient father, loud enough to kill every other conversation in the room.

The businessman at the next table over joins in (“Oh, it was such an expensive little café, very dark”), and so begins an inter-table discussion on food fads, the death of cupcakes, the rise of upscale doughnut shops and Chinese groceries, and the arrival of Caffè Nero.

I wonder if the businessman is as anxious about this conversation as I am. About getting out of it, I mean. And I’m not even in it.

“DAD! What are you doing?”

I look up as a wrinkly hand releases itself from my coffee cup.

“Her hair was in her coffee.”

I suppose I had to pardon the intrusion of personal space, considering in a sense I was doing the same.

The travelling man stands up to leave and pauses to introduce his father, neglected but for an occasional explanatory remark (“DOUGHNUTS, Dad, they’re making fancy doughnuts now”), to the businessman.

“He’s the brains of the family.”