The best thing about Boston was the rain. It rained and rained and rained on our walking tour, and so we all got t have umbrellas. There is no joy like walking around Boston in the rain with an umbrella.
I have been to Boston several times, and each time i am struck by how small it is! When I was in college, I loved “stopping by” Boston to go shopping at Quincy Market for summer clothes before heading to NYC and then home to California. I hardly paid attention to to the historical significance of the city back then. This trip was all about the history. We did what everyone said was a must: the bus tour as well as the Freedom Trail walking tour. That was very good advice. Maybe it is because this was the first area we visited, but the kids were particularly fascinated by USS Constitution and Bunker hill. We scoured every inch of that ship, and we climbed every step of the Bunker Hill monument.
But there were other great places to visit. Like the balcony where the declaration of Independence was first read to Bostonians so long ago. Or the first State House near the site of the first public school. And the contrasting architecture of the old masonry buildings, and then the invention of steal building materials for the birth of skyscrapers. We visited the graves with their piles of coins. We honored Boston innovation by consuming Dunkin Donuts and wandered around Boston neighborhoods. We walked through Boston Commons, and visited Mrs. Mallard. There, I discovered that my children have been deprived: they have no idea who those ducks are. We will have to fix that problem when we get back home.
I think a person could live in Boston their entire lives and still not visit all of the beautiful churches. We visited Trinity Church. For an architect or art historian, I imagine this church is beautiful in ways the rest of us miss. For the rest of us, this church has all the holy space and majesty one likes to see in an old church. And it was quiet. The many stained glass windows had significance to the original rector and many were built in Europe. The audio tour kept pointing out the blue of the glass, and commenting that it is special glass. It looked like all other colored glass. The paintings were some specific color in some specific design. They were pretty, for sure. The gold and the stone and everything had some kind of cultural meaning. But what the tour missed completely was the reason the church was built. It wasn’t built as a work of art, although the beauty does lend some sense of the holy. It was built as a place to honor God. I wonder if the original rector was more fixated on a cultural masterpiece or on a place of beauty to encounter our mortality. Made me wonder. But it was still a place not to be missed.
And so we have visited Boston. Popi will be going home tomorrow, and we will continue on. It’s always a sad day when we take him to the airport.
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