Harrumph!

I’m a notorious TV disdainer. That’s odd for a boomer who grew up, enjoyed and benefited mightily from the box. I’ve aged to much rather do a cryptic puzzle, read a book or use the net.

I’m the least TV-centric in the family. Yet, I do like a few series that the family watches — Treme, Downton Abbey, and Mad Men. It’s the latter that had me reminiscing and projecting.

I’m a child who followed the WWII generation, not one of them. I did work with and know those guys (almost all men) and their younger siblings/nephews in the 1970s New York City.

I worked trade and business magazines in the 3-martini-lunch era. In fact, one publisher always ordered the same drink, “A triple Bombay martini, hold the olives and hold the vermouth.” It was all three martinis in one, very engineering efficient and thus appropriate for a construction mag.

Drunken afternoons were less of a shock to me as the dissolute lives of those magic creatures the space salesmen. The very term space salesman seems mythological if not metaphysical. Selling space…ooooo. The mundanity of actually pitching ads for print media does not rise to the phrase.

I knew a lot of these guys, men whose work brought in my salary. They often shocked me with the likes of their casual comparisons of sexual conquests of women customers, sales reps, waitresses and even friends’ wives.

However, I also got a few life lessons that have rooted.

I certainly recall the best space salesman I knew at Construction Equipment magazine. I’m comfortable using his name, Larry Huckle. He was one of the wholesome guys. He was also the company’s best salesman year upon year. That was particularly odd as he had Texas and the Southwest, virtually devoid of equipment manufacturers. He skunked the other reps time after time.

He and I were at a bar at the mag’s sales meeting in Boca Raton one time. As a former newspaper reporter, I just had to ask him how he did it. I had grilled the other editors and they claimed not to know. Larry was candid and had no fear of giving up his secret. He said, “I know one thing the other guys don’t. When you’ve made your sale, shut up.”

Sure enough, later on sales calls with various ad guys, I’d see them goof up a sure deal again and again by talking about themselves, making inane talk about the customer or otherwise souring a deal in the bag.

I found as a single guy that Larry’s advice was as good for someone seeking companionship as well. That’s another sale.

Likewise, I came to appreciate a silly rejoinder from another space salesman. He’d inveritably come back to the rhetorical, “How ya doing?” with “Any day I’m not pushing up daisies is a good day.”

That certainly falls in the class of painfully obvious. Yet, the longer I live, the more emotional, intellectually and physical troubles that visit me, the more meaningful and sensible that seems. It’s certainly better than the meaningless, “Fine.” And it inspires introspection.

A third space salesman had another iterative response when anyone did the drama-queen whine about a birthday. To one who complained about marking another year older, he’d always say, “Consider the alternative.” Sure enough, death would remove any joy or even observance of a birthday.

Space salesmen, as well as engineers and other stereotypical literal sorts can pluck all the feathers from our social conventions. After all, they have jobs to do that yield to metrics. To those other of us who like to think that everything is fungible, malleable, such brutal realism can only be good.

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On discovering a couple of what could kindly be termed collectors items, I ran though some of the corporate gifts I’ve gotten over decades. Yesterday’s finds were impressive looking ballpoint pens. The pen body was in the same wood as the substantial box. Both had etched ELRON SOFTWARE into them.

Its Israeli parent, Elron Electronic Industries, is still fat and thriving in various medical and defense businesses there. The mistimed decision to jointly develop software there, here and with some help in Russia was solid, but unfortunately foundered in the industry collapse of 2000-2001 and an IPO that was about three months too late.

Along the way in the good times, management gave us these tchotchkes, along with fleece pullovers, polo shirts and seemingly anything you could weave or brand with the company name or its product names. I have bright yellow INTERNET MANAGER and blue WEB INSPECTOR apparel.

Likewise, various previous companies handed out backpacks to our children on bring-your-kid-to-work day, as well as t-shirts, note pads and on and on. I still like wearing Microcom gear, because I was proud of those products. That company sold itself to Compaq, shortly before that one bought DEC and a NIC manufacturer, with the idea that all together we’d put Compaq instantly into the networking business. That best-of-breed amalgam took more smarts than Compaq’s management and marketing and their new owner HP had. The network-card, DEC networking and Microcom teams were all tossed in the street.

Truth be told, many of us at various companies were amused by such gifts. They cost the companies very little, all of which was tax deductible anyway. The company got diverse use by giving the same stuff to customers and vendors.

The cynical aspect though was what I heard directly from the shots at American Management Associations a long time before. That AMA made its consistent profits by holding seminars for execs. Some of those meetings were at the New York City HQ and others at more luxurious locales like the horse farm at Saranac Lake.

They told us in the publishing division that companies’ managements understood the tchotchke nature of these expensive trips for their underlings. Sure there was the airfare and the hotel and meals costs, some away-from-office time and incidental penalties. The pretense (dubious, I say, having attended numerous of these sessions) was that the managers given these wonderful AMA privileges was that the brass at home expected them to be even better at their jobs after attending.

In reality, AMA told the big shots that these were a great way to make the recipients feel special, and maybe increase the productive competitiveness internally. The best part was that the one or five thousand spent did not add to the salary base. That is why companies so love bonuses over raises. The rewards immediately expire and do not compound.

I don’t even get tired of kindly correcting people who ask about my ENRON jacket. After all, Elron had bad timing with its software efforts, but they weren’t a bunch of crooks.

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The still-handsome, sturdy, hollow gentleman of Dudley Square is ready for some innards.

At 117 years old, the Ferdinand Building is no longer under wraps. The almost-total demolition left the shell of the former furniture store landmark. It’s destined to become the new public-school administration building, and more important the anchor of redevelopment in the square. Rebuilding should take two years.

Even nearly abandoned and derelict for the past 30 years, the graceful, ornamented building was an obvious symbol of the erstwhile humming, vital square. Back when the Orange Line ran as an elevated train here, this area of Roxbury did just fine. More recent times when it became better known for junkies, winos, muggings and the major bus terminal to be super-cautious using appear to be over.

The Baroque Revival-style 1895 building was originally Ferdinand’s Blue Store (still carved on top). It soon claimed to be the largest home-furnishings store in the country.

Sure, it might have been more efficient to tear it down totally, but I think Bostonians are already glad they didn’t.

The facade is grand and a fitting symbol for what we do well here — press past and future Boston together.

Pix note: These were taken this morning early. They are under Creative Commons; do what you want with either, just credit Mike Ball once. Click an image for a larger view.

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My comminuted (multiple breaks and pieces) collarbone got the latest treatment or non-treatment. As an example of how medicine changes and maybe or maybe not advances, conventional orthopedic wisdom has again shifted.

Pic note: Click for a somewhat larger view.

Where a badly broken clavicle used to require holding the big pieces together with a plate and screws (pins, in surgeon lingo), recent trends favor non-surgical benign neglect. This surgical info page describes the options.

Previously, the idea and ideal were to stabilize the whole bone and keep the pieces together to promote faster, stronger bonding healing. Now, according to both my ortho surgeon and physical therapist, the new wisdom is that outcomes are no better with plates/screws than letting the components find each other and form enough bone to made a renewed clavicle.

I’ve only had surgery once in my life, three-plus years ago for a badly broken leg. I shall permanently wear a titanium rod inside my left tibia from my knee to ankle. I’m not eager for more cutting, drilling, pounding, and other internal carpentry.  Yet, I already have a tangerine-sized lump above my left pec. Chums who had broken their collarbones as teens or 20-somethings have insisted I feel their residual bumps, which are much smaller. They said they had simple, single breaks, which may account for the difference.

Several other folk with related knowledge, including Uncle whose daughter is in the PT/rehab biz, concur on the shift from plates/screws. While plain old logic suggests that bones that fuse into their original alignment will be much stronger than those that lump up more randomly, the surgeons say their studies don’t support that. Hard to believe, but in my case it’s a bit late to speculate.

What’s amusing to me, even being an non-controlling participant in this current treatment scheme, is knowing that the science in medical science is mostly not linear. Unlike the concept we grew up hearing, treatments don’t inch or leap ahead to better and better outcomes. Instead, they mostly seem to move in and out like the tides.

I recall my first awareness of that when I was in elementary to middle schools. My mother ran Red Cross chapters, which included planning for and overseeing such courses as first aid and home nursing. She was really annoyed to have to replace those texts and see her instructors were tweaked as the AMA and similar bodies changed their minds with new research truths. I think of covering wounds, particularly burns. Yes bandage; no, open air; no, salve; and on and on, somethings changing with each new major study more than once a year.

Truth be told, docs and medial societies can be incredible faddists. Studies can contradict each other, despite following precise and detailed methods and even being replicated by others. The science can be approximate or fungible, which leads to funky doc punditry. It’s the now-we-know syndrome that comes with the fad of the latest findings. Generally no one dies from the sudden shifts, but I long ago lost faith in the concept of inexorable medical advances.

Certainly even worse than shifts in perceived surgical best practices is drug pushing. So many adults end up with one to a dozen or even more prescriptions. I think of my late in-laws who’d each fill a window sill with their daily meds when they visited. My wife remarked to her mother that those were a lot of different drugs. Her mother agreed and said she asked her doctor if they were all necessary. She reported that he asked her which she’d like to stop, and when she picked one said if she stopped taking it, she’d die.

More commonly, docs find it far easier to treat symptoms with drugs than actually to diagnose the cause of the symptom and, to think back to the ideal of the profession, cure the patient with the like of nutrition, behavior modification and such. So, the docs are more likely to say that taking this or that drug will add two or five or more years to the patients’ lives.

These pharmaceutical company promises may or may not have validity per patient, but we can be sure the benefits don’t compound. That is if you have six prescriptions for drugs your doc says will add those years to your life, you can’t expect the benefits to add up. If it did, we might all expect to live to 150 or longer.

I hark back to childhood when I was never seriously sick, but a pediatrician seemed magic. Swollen tonsils got a single penicillin shot in the butt and cleared up quickly. Nowadays, I”m aware people past their 20s or 30s tend to end up with chronic conditions or ambiguous symptoms. Very much unlike the mystery disease article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine or an episode of House,  we don’t get a team of dedicated, resource (including time) rich doctors who do what is necessary to diagnose and cure us. In fact, we can be pretty sure, our nurses and doctors won’t have the time and inclination to listen to our symptoms and consider our self-diagnosis.

Back to my increasingly lumpy formerly unified collarbone, I didn’t have a lot of options. In the ER and next week followup, the orthopedic surgeons said the muscles would likely keep the bones close enough. I could have insisted on a plate at the time or when I saw the big gap at five weeks, could have pushed to the then big deal of opening me up, re-breaking the bones as needed and then using the plate. So, really, no choice by that time.

Now if I don’t have another trauma to that collarbone and if normal activity including free weights doesn’t snap the new version, the outcome will be acceptable. I won’t project or anticipate. I’ll just go with the idea that the current treatment trend is OK.

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The mini-kingdom of tonsorial parlors in Hyde Park is undoubtedly Logan Square. Salons and barber shops specializing for black women, white men, black men, Latinos and Latinas, plus nails and braiding abound in a tiny stretch at the start of Fairmount Avenue.

River Street goes south and turns right to head west at the HP municipal building, with Fairmount heading east. It’s that stretch of a few blocks that starts with the Logan Square Barber Shop and sees all those related but different places on both sides of the street.

Yesterday, I got a haircut with folklore and barber lore, then I chatted with a barber specializing in African-American hair. No one seems to know quite how the hair center arrived, but everyone with an opinion seems to think there’s plenty of business for all.

As a sidelight, I recall a lecture a couple of months ago by Anthony Sammarco in the nearby library. His Hyde Park (Then and Now) is harmless enough, basically a photo collection with a little commentary in a series you likely have seen. One aspect that stuck with me was that even before Hyde Park became part of Boston (1912), it had a shopping shtick. Close by Clearly Square (a few blocks west and within sight of Logan Square) was a clothing and haberdashery conglomerate. Two large department stores and fitting shops were where many, particularly area men came for suits and shirts and such.

Now for some inexplicable reason, Logan Square is where hair comes to be snipped and styled.

We around here hopped for yet more restaurants. Alas, several promising ones have open and closed in the past few years. Most recently, first TC’s Coffee couldn’t make a go of the pastry biz and the mother eatery Townsends closed with a whiff of scandal. For those, I loved her baked goods, as did so many, but she apparently did not have the traffic of the likes of the close-by Dunkin’. The restaurant with its full bar (including a remarkable collection of ales mated to the meals), was the political and social club meeting place as well as a virtual home to Council President Steve Murphy. I sat with many pols and others by happenstance, at events, for interviews at one or the other. Lackaday.

However, a few healthy restaurants remain, notably The Hyde (disclaimer, a son works there). 

We have several particularistic churches in the same stretch, but mostly it’s hair and nails. For a bit of humor, the most popular woman’s salon, big, busy and rich went south. Salon Capri was between the two squares and where my wife went. They uber-suburbanized themselves though, planting in Dedham’s Legacy Place, making themselves difficult for former customers to get to as well as more expensive.  That might have been a harbinger of doom for the hair biz here, but certainly was not.

Perhaps symbolic of the vitality of this genre was that Qadosh (oriented toward black women) just took over TC’s Coffee. It had been next to one of those odd little churches. TC’s space is airy, has big windows and benefits from the rehab the restaurant owners had performed on what used to be the preeminent hotel on the Neponset River before it decayed. After a month with not even a hand-written sign of the salon name, Qadosh has painted its door and taken the old TC’s Coffee sign out of its frame, surely in preparation for its own lighted one.

Next is Los Magicos Barber Shop (fairly new), seeming to specialize in Latinos. Across the street is Hair by Changes, a full-service place, doing nails on hands and feet, waxing, tanning, facials and such. Heading west, there’s Mona Lisa Beauty Salon, then Luu & Nails.  Close at hand is Finesse, which claims to service men, women and children, but notes shaves and fades, suggesting more of an emphasis on black men.

Up at the River Street bend, on one side is the Logan Square Barber Shop. Opposite are a braiding salon and women’s salon that notes both they speak Spanish and can relax hair.

On my haircut day, I was in the chair with Al, who is widely called Elvis for his appearance. He spoke of his background as the Wahlberg boys’ barber from his Dorchester days. He is never short of opinions. He could not explain how so many hair joints migrated to Logan Square. However, he was plain that he had been surprised to find his shop the only one left in Hyde Park oriented to white men.

Hyde Park covers a lot of streets, but he may be right. I can’t recall another. When we live in Jamaica Plain, we ended up in Roslindale Square for haircuts and begrudgingly, finally tried Logan Square BS. We like the guys, haircuts and prices.

In several towns, I’ve had black barbers tell me they’d take a chance on my thin, Nordic type hair, but they didn’t know how to cut it right. Here, I’ve cut the hair of two of my sons. One has my kind of hair and the other has the thick, dark hair from my wife’s side of the family. Those require very different skills and electric razor guides.

I stopped by Finesse on the way from my haircut to speak with a barber out front for a smoke. He too couldn’t figure out how so many salons and barber shops concentrated in three blocks. Yet, he said everyone seemed busy and thriving.

Now I can’t stop myself from thinking that if the barber shops and salons do so well, they’ll need to invest their profits. Might they finance restaurants?

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Ego into the side pocket, I’m used to teachers, friends, coworkers and such telling me how knowledgeable I am, how smart, blah, blah. I confess that I enjoy the moments when I discover my own oversights and stupidity.

Recently, take hand soap, and not just Lava or other cleaner available in the supermarket.

I’m a serious shopper, almost professional in my efficiency. I know the layouts of the markets I frequent and come in with lists by aisle. I sweep through in under half the time of ordinary mortals, without missing a special or item.

Yet, when it came time to replace my industrial hand cleaner, I lost. Mr. Smart Guy looked and failed. Like my efficient mother, I consider using an index, store map or God forbid, clerk, for directions an admission of incompetence. I did end up at groceries, hardware stores and home centers, asking about those tubs of thick goo I used as carpenters, my auto mechanic friends had on the john counters and my grandfather kept by his mud sink. They looked blankly. A few had heard of or seen them, but they surely didn’t have them in stock. At Lowes for example a young stock guy took me to his cleaning stuff shelves and likewise admitted defeat.

The amusing moment was when I realized my oversight.

Speaking with the staff at the various stores, I had mentioned repeated, “like auto mechanics use.” I didn’t listen to myself.

A few days ago, I walked to the local public library and headed to a grocery when I finally did replay my tape. Damn, there was an AutoZone on the way. I had said again and again, “like auto mechanics use,” without going where auto mechanics and would-be auto mechanic shop.

Sure enough, not only did AutoZone have what I wanted on a helf right inside the door, it had several brands and one with 50% extra in the tub as a promotion. For a scant $2.99, plus MA tax, I had years worth of grime remover/cuticle cleaner.

I was unsure whether to be self-satisfied or humbled. I was both.

Yeah, I’m smart. Yes, I solve problems. Yes, I can be as dumb as the next guy on a given day. It’s a good lesson.

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Heading to what turned out to be a large theater filled with gray hairs and baldies, we stopped nearby the Loews Boston Common for a nosh and drink. Before For the Love of the Music, we headed to Temple Place, a Boston home to the proverbial watering holes.

We’d never been to 49 Social, which had a couple of pluses. First, it was just opening for drinks/dinner and not crowded. Also, it looked comfortable and well designed.

We didn’t have time to try of their long list of $28 wines. Instead from a very pleasant bartender, we got drinks and the charcuterie plate. Chat. Eat. Sip. Chat. Sip.

All was well until it wasn’t. Blue strobe lights and eardrum stabbing siren waves queered the mood.

The bar keep emerged from the basement kitchen saying a pipe had burst and she was soaked. At least she was all in black.

We had to head out with the help. Turns out that only the fire department can turn off such alarms.

Sure enough, in maybe six or seven minutes a truck arrived. Then in another five or so, a ladder truck pulled in. The boys had their toys.

Even before they parked, the Sponge Bob Square Pants plush in the truck window was obvious (pic via my wife’s phone).

Sensibly, the firefighters climbed down and brought their hooks and axes, their gas masks and helmets, their heavy slickers and on and on. I thought of the one time we called them many years ago in JP for a creosote fire in our chimney. It was a quick whoosh, a fat tongue of flame up the top, and anticlimax. The fire was long out before the two trucks came from half a mile away. Several of our other boys in blue were terrifically disappointed. They brought in big axes and kept feeling the walls, obviously hoping for the slightest excuse to break through the plaster and brick. Surely, it had been a boring day and we offered no real excitement. They left looking unfulfilled.

Here too at the 49, the first crew waved off the second one. Nonetheless, a couple of the ladder guys just had to go down the stairs. Axes abounded….you never know, eh?

While waiting for them, we had nice, if abstemious, chatter with the bartender and waiter (no drinks allowed outside). We learned that the owner was Lebanese and that two evenings a week offered Middle-Eastern food, music and belly dancing there. The place has been open not quite a year. The owner appeared as we waited for the fire department. He was calm, as befitting the event,  which happened with plenty of time to rejigger the kitchen before the dinner and party crowds. He said there’d be no tab for us and apologized for the inconvenience. He didn’t exhibit the worst of Boston restaurant attitude, the opposite.

As the sirens and lights stopped and the crews left, we went back in to get our stuff and head to the flick. Of course, I at least left a healthy tip and also took away a good vibe. We’ll be back for a longer session and a meal.

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For only one more example that, for crying out loud in a bucket, we as a species are not multitaskers, consider the young woman who walked off a pier into cold Michigan water while texting. Sure it happens widely and rarely makes the news, except on the level of ridicule by acquaintances and relatives.

I’ve ridden this horse for years, like here and here.  For over a decade, I’ve seen adults and kids in malls walk into objects and people…because their brains are too single-stream to use a phone and travel simultaneously.

I lay special blame at the feet and graves of the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As marketing ploys, they blithely told consumers and managers alike that humans multitask well. This dovetails perfectly with the managers’ belief that lazy employees should be doing three or more complex tasks simultaneously (and well) instead of sucking away company money for goofing off.

Unfortunately for that fantasy, having several computer programs running and one or more phone calls connected and maybe even a meeting or oral conversation at one time is plain stupid. To belabor the computer context, we simply don’t have the RAM, processor speed, or disk to deal with many threads concurrently. A tiny fraction of us have brains capable of multitasking and the odds are high that you are not in that group. Give it a rest.

We believe we do only because software companies and bosses say that is so. This delusion has become so pervasive I’m a multitasker has joined I’m a people person in the list of top meaningless self-descriptions.

The fault, dear humanoid, is not in the handheld device or app, but in ourselves. Do one thing at a time well and avoid rear ending a vehicle or falling on your face.

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A lot of years ago when I was the editor of a grocery magazine, I wrote a feature about throwaway products. By today’s standards, it would surely fall into a rant.

The point was that our readers made a lot of money on items like disposable razors. These non-foods or HABA (health and beauty aids) as supermarket and convenience store folk call them are where the margins are. Overall, a grocery may average a profit margin of under 5%. Contrast that to, say, software companies that may have margins of 45% to 95%. Profits on toiletries are among the highest in the stores.

So when use-and-toss products like razors, condoms and such sell, store owners do little capitalist dances.

My concentration at the time, convenience stores, even measure inventory turn differently. They think in terms of square inches and not square feet. Turns per inch per month determine what they stock, which is why you likely won’t find your favorite brand of this or that unless it’s among the most popular.

This is also one of the reasons they put certain small, high-margin movers on the counter by the cash register. For those, they get paid twice. As impulse purchases at POS (point of sale), these items give great returns. Moreover, manufacturers want that space and turn level as well. For that, they pay an RDA (retail display allowance), which to many not in the biz would seem like a bribe to have the best position.

By the bye, when I was covering grocery, the best seller and highest turn per inch per month in convenience stores was rolling papers. When you gotta have ‘em…

As so many posts here, this circles back to bicycles.

In my article decades ago, I waxed richly on my grandfather’s straight razor, as well as his long marriage. He was not into disposable anything if he could help it. Years later, I had a huge shock in the early days of PCs when my $1,300 24-pin dot-matrix printer malfunctioned. A Toshiba repair shop guy said sure he could fix it, but he noted that it was the chip welded into the motherboard. That would cost $900 to $1,000 to replace. A newer, much quieter, more capable and reliable model sold for about $500. It was the old almost-working-paperweight cliché. With regret at being wasteful and trapped, I handed it to a tech training school to fix or cannibalize for parts.

So this week, I found myself locked into the more fragile, higher tech replacement routine, this time for bike pedals and cleats.

I’ve used Shimano SPD cleats and pedals for eight or nine years on my road bike. The cleats were small, ugly, steel and damned tough.

A week and a half ago, one of my pedals came apart, irreparably, on a ride. The spindle and pedal separated. I managed to keep squeezing my shoe toward the crank to keep putting the pedal in play for the 10 miles home. Going up the steep hills was, shall I write, exciting.

Those pedals are so 20th Century. Shimano, among the others, has moved on. The bike shop didn’t have the old style, but I was able to order the newer version from the cycling cyclops Nashbar/Performance/Bikes Direct. (Pic note: I claim fair use from a cropped image from the box to show non-cyclists what a pedal looks like today.)

Modernity brings:

• Easier clip into the pedal
• Quick kick out as needed
• Slightly lighter pedals and cleats
• More comfortable, less noisy walking on the cleats (I tend to bring light mocs and swap out for beer bars)
• Plastic pedal body covers
• Plastic cleats

The instructions make it plain that I’ll be replacing the cleats and covers. It may only be once a year or two for the cleats, but like any good disposable product, new, improved, better means also costlier.

I bought spare cleats when I got a new pair of road-bike shoes that did not come with SPD ones. Those cost me $11. The list on the SL style models is around $30. A discount is about to $25, plus shipping or full price at a bike shop.  At every two years, replacement amortizes at about 4¢ a day, ride or not. In contrast, the much longer lasting old metal style might be in the range of 0.3¢ a day.

Those are still small beer in the world where people routinely buy a coffee for $2 or $3. On top of that, I estimate that I’ve put between 50,000 and 60,000 miles on that bike and that original set of Ultegra pedals. I don’t think anyone should say Shimano made a poor-quality product. I sure got my money out of the pedal that finally broke.

There is no metal equivalent of the new cleats. Were there to be one, it would surely damage the pedals with use — much more expensive replace than plastic cleats.

Here I am, again an alter kaker in a new world. Life in fact insists on going on, bringing me with it.

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We felt a perverse breeze of ease last night headed home. A tony, or at least expensive, Boston neighborhood — the Back Bay — was blacked out from transformer fires.

Bordering on schadenfreude, the feeling related to the two decades we lived in a subneighborhood, the Woodbourne area at the bottom of Jamaica Plain. There the ugly, stupidly at risk power lines and transformers above the street frequently shorted, blew up otherwise, or knew the wrath of falling trees. We had several blackouts annually, from a few hours to several days. Here an almost always electrically privileged swath of real estate was humbled.

We had just seen, heard, felt the emotionally, intellectually, politically powerful Ameriville performance downtown. (By the bye, for locals or immediate visitors, it’s through Sunday, 3/18, and a breathtaking 90 minutes that musical theater barely describes.) While we like to be public-transit folk, time and early morning rising dictated parking at the Boston Common garage near the theater next to Downtown Crossing.

The garage had power and we didn’t consider that as we paid upstairs in the new automated (electronic) system and exited using our ticket, now a receipt. I wonder now whether the massive underground car park has generators or what provisions they have for humanoids to appear like fairies to let drivers escape.

A block left on main drag Beacon was like the opening of a sci-fi flick. There were no traffic lights, no street lights, no house lights, no business lights. The cops were not yet at intersections, so it was first-come to each intersection, a social convention that in Boston neglects the Golden Rule. (Oh, and the subways were closed.)

Maybe two miles along Storrow Drive with only headlights produced that odd felt sense of a desolate highway in the rural South. Then at Fenway, left was black and gray, except for blue police cruiser lights. Right was the shabby, overbuilt commercial strip of motel, gas stations, bars and the trappings of not-quite-downtown.

It seems 13,000 Bostonians are without power down there this morning and may be so for a day. With all the businesses and wealthy residents, at least they’ll know they get five-star repair service.

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