Dispatches, Essays, & Images from a Boston Writer
Laura Dwight started keeping a mental inventory of all the ways her once great neighborhood in Boston’s Back Bay was headed for the garbage chute– crumbling front stoops, broken gates, dirt and litter patches passing for gardens and flower beds. She lived in the Back Bay, the tidy track of streets surrounding Newbury St, Boston’s […]
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After living here for more than a decade, I thought it was time to visit the Boston Public Library. I wasn’t avoiding the library. I don’t have any past traumatic library experiences like racking up enormous overdue fines or getting busted reading a copy of the Karma Sutra tucked behind A Brief History of Time. […]
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There’s an episode of Friends where Rachel convinces Phoebe to get a tattoo with her. go Rachel has a small heart inked on her hip. Phoebe chickens out. The blue speck of ink on her shoulder is as far as she got before bolting. Rachel is pissed; they had a pact. “They use needles!” she […]
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In Boston, the dead are everywhere. They are immortalized as statues in the middle of courtyards and public walkways; they show up on plaques tacked onto the outside of historic buildings and screwed onto the backs of park benches. They lie in the ground across nineteen different cemeteries spread out across the commonwealth. The city […]
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The post office is within walking distance of our house. It abuts the commuter rail depot near the end of the main street that makes up the brief downtown business area. The post office is little more than the size of a roomy New York studio apartment complete with the exposed brick, grimy linoleum, and […]
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There are no shortage of cafés in Boston. Chains co-exist with indie spaces. People are loyal to their favorite spots, putting them in the same category as Jimmy Buffet fans. They are quick to defend the superior quality of everything from the coffee to the music to the unisex bathrooms (big, like, wicked, like room enough […]
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