Chuck's World

Visiting where everybody (who matters) knows your name

You’ll be pleased to hear, I think, that I didn’t succumb to temptation and climb down the steps of the “Cheers” bar across from Boston Commons, looking for Norm and Cliff sitting at Sam Malone’s bar in the afternoon, escaping their boring but oddly amusing lives.  I skipped that.

I knew, of course, that it wasn’t there, that it had been a Hollywood set and I’d find nothing but a tourist trap, nothing but disappointment and despair and loss of childhood innocence, but I still wanted to believe.  Just a little bit.

Instead, I went to Paul Revere’s house.  Reality trumped TV, at least for me, at least for this trip.

I don’t travel much for various reasons, mostly involving necessity, or really lack of it.  It’s ironic; I work in a time and in an occupation that allows me to function from anywhere on the planet with Internet access, and I rarely leave home for pretty much the same reasons.  There is no office to visit on the other side of the country, no seminars to attend and no meetings to arrange. 

So my trips are few and mostly based around family, who are far but not that far.  I haven’t been east of north Texas in years, and I haven’t been to Texas since 2004.  I was ready for a trip.

Here’s the back story: In 1983, my wife and I and several friends from college moved to Seattle.  Well, wait: That’s probably too far back.  Let’s jump a quarter-century. 

My daughter, who graduated from the University of North Texas last year, and who appreciated her education there but really, really wanted to leave Texas, imitated her parents and took another cross-country caravan, this time leading a group of UNT grads to New England (it was a mutual decision, of course, but then I know my daughter; she led). 

She moved into a lovely house in Arlington with four and sometimes six people, got a job and started asking me when I was coming for a visit.  This was the first day.

It was time, then, and as I took the red-eye east last week, trying to sleep on a plane and failing. I noticed the sun rising at 3:30 a.m. my time, just like on the summer solstice.  It seemed appropriate, a symbol of a big trip; I wasn’t just going across the country, I was journeying to June.  It was time travel, in other words, and it really was.

I know I have West Coast biases and sensibilities; I was born here and I’ve lived on the left side all of my life, more or less (Arizona was less).  I’m used to wide-open spaces and minimal public transportation, to remnants of pioneer spirit and mountains that mean something.  I’m used to freeways and mild weather and coffee that does not (and I need to repeat this, DOES NOT) come from Dunkin’ Donuts. 

So I was prepared, on my first trip to New England, to celebrate the differences, and still my jaw dropped and I smiled so much my teeth started to hurt.  From the deli in Brookline to Harvard Square in Cambridge, from the residential ordinariness of Lexington to the rural lushness of Concord, from wide-open Boston Commons to the narrow streets of the North End, I saw new things and old things, and I was in hog heaven.

I saw the statue of Samuel Adams, with the simple words: A Patriot, and suddenly I imagined Sam rolling his eyes at flag pins and missing hands over hearts during the National Anthem.  Patriotism in Adams’ day was elementary and easy: Just call the King of England a tyrant and know a noose had your name on it, say your piece in the public square and grab your weapon.  The rest is just talk radio.

But for all the history, all the walking over crumbling cobblestones and stirring up dust in graveyards, all the parsing of accents and floating in the smells of about a thousand Italian restaurants, the sight I most wanted to see was waiting for me at the airport.

She’s 23, and only occasionally now do I catch the 7-year-old girl in her eyes.  She’s accomplished and grown-up, living in a new city and living it up, and she showed me around and fed me and gave me shelter and drove like some sort of maniac.  Seriously.

I am so proud of her, for living and learning and surviving me, for remembering and for caring, for being brave and for moving on.  And it was about as perfect a trip as there could be; spring came to Boston when I did, temperatures soaring into the 70s and beyond with sunny skies, and she knew it would all work out.

And it did, and mostly because I went for the right reasons.  Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and that means family, and some of mine live in New England, which, as it turns out, is a nice place to visit.