IN TRANSITION #22
Flying down the Mass. Pike last Saturday en route to the North End for dinner, I looked up at the blurry but beautiful Boston skyline. My heart sank: Would this be the last time?
Suddenly nostalgic, I realized how attached I had become. Four years after arriving here as a stranger and all set now to move on in a week, I was struggling with that ever elusive sentiment: closure.
''We must get dinner!" I had written an old high school friend, Ai-ris, who had moved to Boston along with me in the fall of 2001, she for MIT, myself for Harvard. We had been meaning to catch dinner for some time, but now it seemed somehow apt. We had convened periodically over the years to reminisce and reflect on this cold foreign place we'd come to inhabit and explore.
This time, I wrote to tell her that I was leaving. I told her about my new job at The New York Times. Ai-ris, a med student now, had news of her own. She was engaged.
I didn't put a lot of thought into the choice of the North End for the celebratory dinner, yet the selection felt satisfying. When I was a freshman, the North End had been the only place I knew of to ''go into Boston" for a special occasion meal.
As we waited for the valet to return the car late Saturday night, we looked up at the empty space where that other green monster -- the highway version -- used to be. (Speaking of the Sox, the Curse vanished during my time here, too.) Four short years ago, like a conscientious explorer, I had wandered through the maze of construction underneath it, combing the city for surprises, giddy with excitement that for the first time in my life, almost anything I'd ever wanted could be found on foot.
Growing up in Tucson, Ariz., -- a sprawling desert metropolis of strip malls, parking lots, and single-family dwellings -- the notion of walking from one side of the city to the other was exotic. I was enamored with the T, which rumbled every few minutes beneath my dormitory floorboards. I became instantly fond of this place where so much life -- political marches, conversations in dozens of languages, street performances -- kept on at what seemed like all hours, within earshot of my desk.
My college thesis adviser told me that back when she graduated college, Boston was the ''it" city for the post-college 20s. New York, I would argue, has since become the indisputable owner of that distinction. And the longer I've lived in this city, the more I can see why. I've become restless. Every time I've failed to find an open kitchen after 11:30 at night, every time I've been forced to take a cab or decided to stay at home because the T closed down not long after midnight, I've (guiltily) thought of moving. The pace of life I once found so exciting has morphed into sluggishness. It took me months to recognize, but I'm eager for change.
But as I wandered lazily through the Public Garden on my way back to the Charles/MGH T stop Sunday night after a long day of Christmas shopping, with the trees lighted, couples holding hands, a bright moon hanging just above the old buildings lining the Common, Boston seemed, in its own way, idyllic. An ideal setting for a fairy tale wedding proposal; and as Ai-ris had related events of the night before, it had been.
Four-and-a-half years ago, I gathered with high school friends on a cool August night before departing for college. We sat under the stars, discussing where we imagined ourselves in five years. Would we stay in touch? What kind of people would we be? Where would we live?
How much of our lives would be spent transitioning from place to place, lover to lover, friend to friend, change to change? All of it?
In that moment in the Public Garden last week, the range of possibilities seemed endless.
Benjamin Toff, as of late last week, became a New Yorker. Reach him at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.
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