The first day of spring

Just back from The Blue Note, a seafood place, where I had tuna ala mercuria with cajan sauce and two glasses of wine. Stared out into the drizzly night, the red taillights of cars reflected in the wet pavement, eavesdropped on some fat face, ala John Brown, guy discussing politics with his real estate investor friend. Bush has the common touch, the stammering oh gosh gee folks stuff that Kerry lacks and the US, the fat faced guy informed his friend, is a big place and the midwest, well, enough said. Not wanting to hear more, I skipped dessert and walked in the drizzly rain home.

I went finally to Einstein exhibit. No googaw laser beam fractile sagging space/time grids can explain relativity--sorry, I'm slow, I know, and it always makes me rue my lack of math prowess. I get e=mcsquared--that math I can do and get that the speed of light is somehow interwoven with the structure of the universe, but how and how is it that time slows as you go faster yet the speed of light remains the same is no matter how fast you go.

Took the T to the exhibit. Rode with the city people, thinking how Boston and NY are as close to Europe as you get in this country. People who have lived on top of each other, learned to ignore and tolerate the "other", know that perfection is never going to happen, the big mansion on the hill where you never have to meet anyone but people like yourself unless they are servants--all that American dream is not an issue here like it is in the mid west and the west. Here you rub shoulders with the daft young man in dirty coat and homemade signs of oil comapanies stapled on a stick, saying we rule the world, and the asian student, the crippled old woman with shopping bag and the Bruins hockey team t-shirted fans going to the game, and the city faces, creased and lined, squinted against the reality of cinder covered snow and the garbage laden underground tunnels where you cannot chose who sits next to you or bumps against you.

I like these people. I am of course romantizing them, imagining them larger than they are. But I'll take them, trust them in some way I cannot the Californian, everything's gonna be ok, just be cool, man, sunshine denial of our human condition--the fact that everything is not going to be ok and the decision to live with that knowledge--I enjoy imagining that these people have made it. Making the best of a bad bargain, they ride to whereever they are going, stony faced, spaced out, talking with a friend, reading, not expecting it to be better than it is, not waiting for the millineum which after all has already happened, nor for armageddeon which is all around us.

But they are willing to live with you, you dark skinned or dirty or wigged out, or destitute or maimed or briefcase laden or backpacked or drugged as long as you ride beside them and keep your insanity contained. They are willing to coexist and so they are brave and give me hope for the future.