Man vs. Beantown

I'm slowly expanding my personal horizons in Boston. (Brighton, I learned yesterday, is actually part of Boston, not, as I thought, a separate municipality.) We rode the 57 bus to the grocery store yesterday, which we have to mark as a failed experiment: half an hour of waiting for a bus that comes "every twelve minutes", during which a clump of four buses zipped past in the opposite direction, on both ends. Standing in an incipient thunderstorm with slowly thawing groceries is not the best use of our time. (Buses that share a route tend to clump together — the bus in front makes more pickups, and thus makes more dropoffs, and thus the bus behind it is able to catch up, and soon enough you've got four buses bumper-to-bumper.) On the plus side, the Shaw's there carries both Tastycakes and Pocky, and if that's not enough Pocky the Super 88 has a whole aisle of "fun snacks," including Burnedmeat Flavour Biscuits, which I did not buy. I did buy: cheap tilapia fillets from a broadly grinning man using only hand gestures, frozen pork-leek dumplings, and Ramen noodles in flavors I'd never heard of. (Is "Cha Chien" related to Ta Chien? TSOR suggests it may be deep-fried Cha Lua, which is a Vietnamese pork-and-fish-sauce sausagey product. I suspect "chien" just means "fried".)

After dinner, we rode the bus more successfully to Harvard Square, so adfamiliares could hang out with the Mennonites (one of whom, she discovered, once dated her Aunt Constance) and I could hunt for First Lensman in the bookstores. No luck with the Doc Smith, but I got some homemade mint oreo ice cream from Lizzy's and wandered through a 300-year-old cemetery, which wasn't too hard to take. (Saddest grave: the "loving son and devoted librarian," dead at age 35.) I did find Talking Heads' Naked and R.E.M.'s Green and Dead Letter Office used — go go Gadget late 80s music! (Newbury Comics has a remarkably well-stocked subsidiary CD store.) Walking the streets, I moved from one summer-evening music bubble to another — pop hits on the pan flute here, alternative acoustic guitar troubadors in the park over there.

Today I repaired (more or less) whatever it was the movers did to the brakes on my bike, which required more cursing and grease and scraped knuckles than I would've liked, then rode to Coolidge Corner, home of Trader Joe's and the Brookline Booksmith. It's only about a twenty minute ride, but Washington is crazy hilly; it's nicer to take Cambridge. Now I've replenished my stock of paperbacks and pretzel thins; I should be able to face the week.