Harrumph!

To us non-Catholics (Roman or Eastern Orthodox), the fixation on Christ’s blood, wounds and suffering may well seem bizarre. While raised as a devote little Christian,  I was a Protestant and without all the figurative and literal gear.

Yet, many years ago, I picked up a dye envelope in a Greek grocery and reveled in the true blood color it produced on eggshells. In contrast, the silly pastels in my childhood Easter baskets were insipid and unmemorable.

This year, I swung by the West Roxbury’s Greek International Food Market (great place). Selecting a basket of cheeses, olives, taramasalata, retsina and bread, I was pleased to see dye packets by the register.

Alas, with my eggs handy, I was stunned to find the offering was pink, pink I say, in the water. Even had I used a small portion of the water it called for it would not at all resemble blood.

I ended up with eggs that had a color that likely never appears in nature. I have to admit though, the pink is so garish we all liked it.

Next year, I’ll shop around a bit and make sure to get the blood version.

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If Forest Hills is a palace among cemeteries, Westerly is a studio apartment, one with a terrible view, but well furnished nonetheless. Today I wandered a bit in the wee West Roxbury burying ground. It has treasurers.

In particularly, Westerly’s existence reflects WR’s then and current attitude. As part of Roxbury and founded about the same time as Boston, near 1630, what became West Roxbury had to have their own, as they do now. The locals buried their bodies in Eliot Street ground, at what became Dudley Square. In 1683, the gentry in western Roxbury decided it was too much of a bother and set up their own cemetery, with the first burial in 1691.

For us cemetery and iconography freaks, the keen feature is that the ground with only a few hundred burials (many currently who knows where and without stones remaining), Westerly has examples of three centuries of New England stones.

While the MFA filched one as an good example of the slate stone, none of the iconography is unique or even spectacular. However, this little ground is a fine place to see a wide range in a single location.

That spot by the bye is now the backyard of the gigantic Walgreen’s on Centre Street. The unlocked entrance is behind a bus stop at LaGrange. It’s right there, but even many locals don’t notice it or stroll through. It’s on the historic register and comes with the standard restrictions, like no dog walking, no booze, and no gravestone rubbing.

License note: All pix are Creative Commons-Attribution. Do what you want with them. Just give Mike Ball credit once.

Westerly has many examples of the N.E. classic icon of a winged skull. These are symbols of transformation — to the afterlife. Mehetabel Newel (d. 1739) is a fine example of the early 18th Century work, replete with side scrolling.
	The top in slate is finely carved and has survived well.
Robert Seaver’s (died 1770) already shows the personalization. The original Puritans allegedly saw no chance of communication with the Almighty, yet the skull ornamentation continued to evolve from stylized bones to faces. I’d bet that this resembled Seaver.
	An older stone, Elizabeth Bacon (died 1713) showed what happened when you gave license to the carver, who expanded the acceptable symbolism. These works are unsigned, although some carvers were prolific enough to be known.
Some of the starkest examples of the skull remain the most straightforward. Here the stone of Benjamin Lyon (died 1752) were Puritan in providing just his death and age, although with modest scroll work
	In some cemeteries, stones of infants and small children have wee lambs and such. Here, Little Willie (Hunting, died 1860), under two years, had no decoration.
More typically for a child, four year old Abby Harper (died 1845) had a stone with simple wording, but flowers in bud and blossom. Of course, those represented a young life. These are among the most poignant in some cemeteries when there are several blossom or lamb stones together for youngsters who fell to an epidemic.
	Westerly has a common icon that appears in many N.E. cemeteries. The gathered sheaf of wheat represents God harvesting the people in their time.
Wheat often appeared in whole family plots. Here, the (died 1877 and 1878) stones of Abner and Mary Guild show the symbol, clearly done by the same carver.
	A variation in the same period was a sheaf on top of the stone. This might appear on a single grave, or as here in the mid-to-late 18th Century family stone of the Drapers.
Despite the elaborate carving, these wheat bundles survive amazingly well. Here the 1840 stone topping still shows detail.
	Westerly has several other common symbols done well, particularly the urn and willow. Here, an early version on the stone of William Lyon (died 1714) shows cherubs bearing a urn. The container symbolizes the soul within the body, with the transformation winged skull above, as the little angels carry the urn off. We presume there were headed upward.
More typically, stones came to include willows. These trees symbolized eternal life. Here a particularly fine specimen appears on an 1877 stone.
	As in the previous from the same period, the willow appears next to an urn, with its body/soul symbolism.

Resident directory: The 280 known burials have gotten history buffs excited. The Find-a-Grave site lets you search them, many with images and some with transcriptions of the text. No one hugely famous is here, but there are many from pre-Revolutionary through the Civil War.

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Chicken pox? Shingles? WTF?

Fairly under orders from my uxorial unit, I pressed the shingles vaccine to its fulfillment today. In real speak, I got the long-overdue shot.

I’ve only known one person who had shingles. Surely there have been others, but only one fessed up. It was many years ago in Greek class, six semesters with only six students and Prof. Ott. We were relatively intimate or at least casual by our three-times-a-week meetings on the quaint and townhouse scaled horseshoe on the old campus of the University of South Carolina. Our studies lent themselves to object lessons and our professor had many applicable tales to impress the lessons of classics into our memories.

Among other texts of mythology and history, we translated the Iliad and Odyssey. Many of these led Prof. Ott to discourses on life in general and her experiences in particular. As well as her recounting visits to Athens and other classic-related sites, she mentioned shingles several times. She had it and was plain that the itching and burning and other recurrent, prolonged symptoms were dreadful. In the end, shingles attacks as so many of her experiences led her to focus her attention on matters Greek and philosophic. Nonetheless, she hoped that none of us ever got the incurable curse.

While still incurable, shingles are now preventable…so doctors would have us believe. My wife is also a believer, having read of the wonders of the vaccine.

It is pertinent in our times, as the viral disease can appear in anyone who has had chicken pox and even those who have never had the disease but been inoculated against it. That’s most of us. Moreover, between one and four percent of healthy folk get it, a rate that basically triples as we age, peaking about retirement age. As a result, docs now recommend that anyone over 60 get the vaccine, apparently so we don’t suffer to the end.

That seemed simple enough, until the swine-flu syndrome kicked in. My wife’s regular doc gave her the shot last year and suggested she tell other boomers to do the same. Well eventually, I asked my internist and fell into the whirlpool of medical fads.

As with swine flu, yes, the medical literature was virtually unanimous. This was a necessary shot. In turn that meant that every FP, GP and internal medical sort fell into line. It naturally followed as with swine flu that there were a lot more willing patients than drug.

I have been on a waiting list for half a year. The docs and nurses would check. Yup, I was on the list. Nope, they had no idea when they’d get vaccine.

Well, today I was by for a routine check and asked afterward. This was not the first the crew at Harvard Vanguard had heard of this. They weren’t too jaded to kick in though. They confirmed on the database that I was in queue. Then after 10 minutes of calling around, one nurse found that they happened to have received 80 doses that very afternoon. I chilled for half an hour before a vial could be set aside and another half for it to travel from ground floor up one level and end up in my arm.

Of course, I had to sign the usual vaccine waiver that any side-effects were just too damned bad. Plus, I got the dreadful Center for Disease Control flyer on how awful shingles are and what God-awful reactions might occur from the vaccine.

My reward was from the injecting nurse. She explained that it was one of the few vaccines that they gave subcutaneously — into body fat in the arm.

I dutifully pushed up my right shirt sleeve and she went to work. She seemed to be spending a long time pinching and pushing with her fingers. Finally she said, “You have some muscle mass. I’ve having a hard time finding any fat to use.”

Well, I have fat elsewhere, but that was a pleasant artifact from a medical visit.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, shingles, boomers, chicken pox, vaccination, Greek, Harvard Vanguard

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Probably all of us as adolescents had our cranky periods. Brookline never outgrew its.

Unless you live there, they are too good for you anyway. They don’t even want you parking there. They don’t need your damned tourist dollars. If you are from a neighboring town, why don’t you just stay there?

Speak to someone from Brookline and you are likely to hear how friendly they are. After all in schools, income, personal achievement and every other way, they are superior and have a lot of reason to be happy.

Brookline as a town makes its attitude plain on every street and road coming it. I think of it particularly as I bicycle around Eastern Massachusetts. (Fortunately for lesser mortals such as me, Brookline does not put up toll roads at its borders…yet.)

Other burgs in the area, such as Boston, Newton, Somerville and Cambridge, are different. Signs on streets entering those have this curious term that seems unknown in Brookline — WELCOME. Driving, cycling or walking into those ordinary places read WELCOME TO…

The Brookline version appears here. You are not welcome. You will not park anywhere in town for more than two hours, and there will be places that permit less time or none at all for non-residents. You will not park on the street anywhere overnight.

Go home. You don’t belong there.

It doesn’t work the other way, of course. Many from Brookline work in the financial district, medical facilities, corporations and universities of Boston and Cambridge.

You get a sense of the long standing of the Brookline attitude from its geography and governance. Brookline is a self-selected island of Norfolk County. As you can see from the map, it appears to be a thumb protruding into Boston’s bottom.

The rest of Norfolk County is to the South. Brookline refused to join Boston on several occasions, the last in 1873 when the town of West Roxbury agreed to annexation. Now Brookline is an exclave (not coincidentally sharing the first four letters with exclusive).

Back to bicycling, for all its snootiness, Brookline as a town is OK by riders. They don’t have nearly enough bike racks (goes with the car-parking attitude surely), but the cops there expect drivers to play nice with riders.

It has one nice, large park, plus the Olmsted site. We attend an old UU church there. The Brookline Village and Coolidge Corner areas have numerous OK, some good, but no great restaurants. (Note: Be very careful in the Village in the evening. Predatory towing services constantly monitor all off-street parking lots of closed businesses. They will get your car within 10 minutes.) It also has a concentration of kosher restaurants and bakeries.

Brookline never joined Boston, never formed its own county and apparently never got lonely for the rest of it body and buddies. It is content to float solo.

If you want to visit, bring quarters for the meters and for God’s sake, get out within two hours!

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, parking, Brookline, welcome

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Premature and ignominious death can visit us suddenly, cruelly and diversely. Surely there are even worse forms than being hit by a city bus. Dying under the wheels of a garbage truck comes to mind.

Yet, a 22-year-old Bostonian dying when being run over by a bus is awful enough.

Update: The Herald reports that the cyclist was Eric Michael Hunt of Mission Hill, which is the area where he died.

Police and the T have not named the cyclist or revealed his other details. We know more about the 29-year-old bus driver (only two years service, but a clean record). The BostonChannel site has the available info.

Commentary, including the requisite all cyclists/drivers are incompetent cowboys, appears at Universal Hub. That URL is likely to carry any updates as well.

I’m intellectually and emotionally invested. I bike almost daily. I’ve been hit twice by inattentive drivers (one car and one truck in a little over 20 years) who were disobeying laws as well as safety and common sense. Plus, I know that dangerous Huntington/South Huntington intersection well.

Click the thumbnail above for a closer view on the Google map. Those arcs are the trolley tracks implicated in the fatal wreck yesterday.

While I have an old mountain bike, I almost always use my thin-wheel (23mm tires) road bike in and around Boston. I find that particular intersection dangerous for cars and extremely so for cycles. The tracks make cars and trucks slide over the lane and would catch all but the fattest bike tires with the slightest inattention. Turning left heading north to west there requires a dance of exquisite timing to cut at sharp angles over the tracks while watching traffic and lights from three directions for the very short opening of green lights — assuming motor vehicles do not run the reds as they often do. It’s a heart-pounding event every time.

While drivers don’t seem to know or may forget, cyclists invariably lose in a collision with a car, truck, trolley or bus. Oddly in the inevitable I-hate-cyclists comments on websites and in public, that injury, dismemberment or death reality can translate into, “Those damned cyclists better stay out of my way!”

Boston Beserker

I see versions of that frequently in Boston. Just yesterday, leaving the West Roxbury Y, heading south on Centre to turn left in one long block onto Lagrange, I was tailgated by a foolish woman blowing her horn all the way. Consider:

• She had been stopped at the light above where I entered the road, so she had to speed to get up to me anyway.
• I was in the left lane as required by law, making my left signal as required by law, and entering the left-turn only cut at the Lagrange light.
• Those pesky laws require anyone approaching any other vehicle to use care and slow as necessary for safety.
• The Lagrange light was red and she had to stop anyway.
• There was nowhere for a cyclist to disappear to regardless of the indignation of a driver who resented sharing the road.

She used her car and horn to threaten and scold, not for any safety considerations. She made an awful face and gesture, despite her being totally wrong. She did not hit me, just, it would seem, hated me.

With the obvious exceptions (think bike paths and turnpikes), cycles and motor vehicles have the same responsibilities, rights and road access. The bike haters forget the rights part. They too often remind me of bigoted Southerners I knew in my childhood. Those folk loved to tell stories of lazy or dishonest Black people they claimed to have witnessed or heard about as proof it was OK to defame or distrust the lot of them.

Who Loses?

We cyclists are too aware of who’ll lose in a collision. Moreover, lax law enforcement and laxer obedience of traffic regulations and laws by drivers mist every ride with the scent of danger.

For yesterday’s death, initial reports are that a bike tire jammed in the trolley track and as the cyclist tried to dislodge it, the bus drove around the corner and crushed him. Even in Boston’s notorious no-blood-no-ticket environment, the likely outcome would be no charges against the driver, assuming he could not have stopped in the estimated 150 feet he had.

Of course, we can surmise that an attentive driver operating at reasonable speed would have seen the adult standing in the road and been quick enough to stop. That is merely a surmise though and it seems police and judges are like most citizens, identifying more with drivers than cyclists and erring on the motorist’s side given a choice. That’s not likely to change until we are more like an Amsterdam or other cycling cities where cops and judges bike as well as drive or instead of driving.

I remain a shameless promoter of cycling. It’s healthy. It’s fun. It’s far more scenic. It’s vastly quieter and cleaner than driving. It decreases congestion too.

I am also a claim-a-lane guy. I do stop at red lights and octagonal signs, but if I need the lane to travel safely, I take it and the driver may have to wait two to five seconds for a place to pass. Too bad, but it’s safety, it’s courtesy, it’s common sense, it’s the law.

For that infamous intersection, I’d prefer the tracks disappear and that trolleys stop at Brigham Circle, putting passengers on buses a few block earlier. Watching cars skid at that intersection and knowing the risk to cyclists tells me this needs fixing.

Meanwhile, I’ll watch for details on that dead cyclist and for any outcome other than the predictable Boston Police one of “unavoidable accident.”I expect reports will eventually clarify the initial ones of the cyclist hitting the back driver side of the bus. If the cyclist had been in front of the bus, which came around the corner and overtook him, then the bus hit the cyclist, not the other way around. The first go sure sounds like T parsing to shift responsibility.

I’m heading off today on a pretty long ride through Boston, Brookline and beyond. I expect to make it home, but it’s always an adventure.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cyclist, bus, death, Boston

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At the West Roxbury YMCA today, one of the desk staff sought me to say excitedly that a Ribbon Rack® was on the way. He said the Y had applied to the city for a bike rack in the parking lot and had heard back that there’s one coming in the spring when the weather warms enough to make it practical to install.

I am, after all, the jerk (maybe squeaky wheel or crank) who had a fit about the old rack. Not only did it not suit bikes after the 1970s, but when they had the lot repaved, it ended up nearly useless against a brick wall.

My mom would be proud that I am carrying on her example. She had little patience with inefficiency or stupidity when it affects others. She’s dead several years now, but lives through me in this way at least.

The existing badly reinstalled bad rack actively discourages bikers. Setting aside the contradiction of driving a few miles to exercise to stay or get fit, I figure it can work the other way. The Y has two parking lots, often full, with spillover into adjacent residential streets. When cyclists discover a conveniently located, sensibly installed and easy to use rack, with my bike and a couple of others, they are likely to be inspired to spin 2 to 5 miles instead of driving.

I’ll report on the effects come spring.

Oh, yes, and the requisite praise should go to the city’s bike coordinator, Nicole Freedman, and Mayor Tom Menino to, if you pardon, driving this rack program.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, crank, YMCA, bike rack

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My late mother does manifest through me. As in the tiny woman cowing the gigantic manager, I would shamelessly embarrass my children in pursuit of efficiency and clear thinking. Fortunately for them, none of my boys was at the Y yesterday to hear me.

My mom may be dead, but the world is not missing a crank. I have replaced her.

At issue is the week-long parking-lot repaving that is into its third month. In fairness, we had some rain and other bad weather, but this is being done on contractor time.

The last piece was re-installing the bicycle rack. This is something I know a bit about, having spec’ed a rack for a church, having attended multiple Moving Together and other transportation conferences, having interviewed the bike coordinators of Cambridge and Boston, and being a very regular cyclist.

I had spoken with the Y’s staff, including the executive director. I said it would be a false economy not to replace the inadequate 1960s rack with a much more sensible Ribbon Rack. It holds more bikes and more types of bikes in less space.  I pointed them to one in the neighborhood at the public library. I noted that the city has an active program to place racks for free in likely places. I added that there were reimbursement programs that would require only paying for installation. Everyone responded with aggressive head nods and promises to follow up.

Horse feathers!

When the rack reappeared, not only was it the same lame old one whose upright members don’t accommodate any mountain bike or even modern road bikes, the solid-geometry deficient and cycling ignorant pavers had actually set it as in the above image (click for larger view). As the new placement is not even a wheel diameter away from the brick wall, the only way to lock a bike to it is is sideways, limiting it to three at best and more likely two bikes. Duh.

In other words, if the aim is to service the Y members or encourage visitors to leave cars at home, this fails. Cyclists I know and I would not ride a bike there if we knew that the racks would not be easy to use or in this case even possible to use.

Channeling my mother Wanda, I asked the staff to call the executive director. I led her to the rack and explained why it utterly failed at its aim. I discussed the options for free or reduced cost racks and insulted the intellect of the paving minions.

She alleged she would be interested in links to the rack programs.  Arriving home, I sent her links to:

• Boston’s bike-rack request form
• Boston’s Bike Coordinator Nicole Freedman
• The MAPC rack-reimbursement program
• Ribbon Rack

She replied quickly by return email that she was not aware of these and was delighted to have the information. Crank. Crank. Crank.

I shall watch eager to see whether and if so how long it will take to put a functional rack in the parking lot or in one of the two locations (Bellevue or Centre) I suggested for the free city ones that have to go in pubic spaces.

Like Wanda, I do not raise my voice. However, also like her, I am reasoned and relentless. It all seems to intensify with age.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, crank, YMCA, bike rack

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Clichés attacked my brain yesterday while lifting weights. Those who knew me young will find that itself amusing, as I did not lift in my teens, in fact not until I was in my mid-50s, long after any bulk-up effects would ensue.

At just 15, my wrestling coach ordered those of us under 16 to keep off free weights and use push-ups and sit-ups instead. They were the way he got his own steely bod. The next year, I started my swimming career, in which the coaches opposed such muscle-tightening. Meanwhile, I developed with a million or two breast strokes.

When I had a big disk (L5-S1) pop into my spinal column, I began lifting as rehab. It helped keep the blood pumping around the renegade disk to resorb (dissolve) it, thus avoiding risky surgery. I did that for a couple of years, then didn’t and just started again at twice a week for upper body. I get plenty of leg work with cycling and hiking.

With that setup, I come to the clichés.

I grew up very WASPy, with pretty standard Boomer ethics. While our WWII parents often urged behavior they did not model, one regular message was that vanity was unmannerly and self-indulgent. I bought into that and in fact, my mother and her parents also acted accordingly.

Yet with my weight loss following my tib/fib fracture and related changes, has inspired me to look a bit. I am trimmer than since I began college, plus I keep tabs daily or weekly on blood pressure, weight and body fat percentage. I have a machine for each.

My trim trouser set is back in play. I might have tossed them a few decades ago but am doubly glad I didn’t. Now I have new clothes, plus my ego is pleased enough to keep me monitoring my girth.

So yesterday, I was in the dank (two working sump pumps all the time) dungeon of the West Roxbury Y for my bi-weekly strain fest, 46 minutes of arm and chest thingummies. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and let myself look.

One of the lifts is lateral dumbbell raises. As I finished, I saw that even on an old man, some muscles had changed a cut. The backs of the triceps brachii were evident. Moreover, sitting on the bench, I noticed that the delts rippled with definition.

Suddenly a philosophical question ensued. What would be sadder, for a tuned body to just stop, say car wreck or heart attack, or for it to wither and dissipate with age, disuse or disease?

In turn, the now rampant chestnut of when an elder dies, a library burned leapt to mind. That’s often attributed as an African proverb (of dubious provenance,  allegedly inspired by Caesar’s accidental destruction of the library at Alexandria). It’s still a powerful thought. Most of us do acquire knowledge, skill and judgment from repetition and correction if not native intellectual power.

The ultimate personal injustice of life is that death halts it all and the unrecorded and un-transferred treasures of mind go into the ground or melt in the crematorium’s heat, figuratively at least. We can pretend that each of us continues to be curious, keeps reading and analyzing, adds to instead of just reinforces our knowledge and sensitivity. Thus, death is a shared sadness beyond the emotional toll on the survivors. Humanity and its intrinsic store lessens a tiny bit with each corpse.

Being my mother’s son, I seldom allow such wallowing in self-absorption and admiration. I forgive myself this time only because my body changes in the past seven months have been profound.

Just after the long glances yesterday in the Y, I thought of dancers, yoginis and athletes I know. Many maintain a fluidity of motion and remarkable muscle tone over decades of human weathering and ripening. I am the equivalent only with aids — in the pool or on a bike. Yet, here too, those trained bodies parallel the discriminating and educated minds.

A Shared Sadness

Alas, through vicissitudes of age, illness, indulgence, lassitude or accident, the finely carved muscles become indistinct as surely as the failing mind. So, to the question, is the sudden or inexorable disintegration a greater sorrow? As long as we are rhetorical, does it even matter or does simply the demise or erosion stand alone?

The answer from my old and trained Protestant ethic would be that letting oneself go would be the worst.  It would be a failure of will and duty.

That involves a level of guilt and moralization I subscribe to no longer. People who are very fat or very thin are should not be a moral issue. Instead, blame and ridicule should fall heavier on those whose minds stagnate from repetition, be it golf or TV.

Let us each stay toned, certainly inside and perhaps out, as long as we are able. Each of us should live as though we expect all who know us or us to be to sad when our treasures go.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, humanity, vitality, vanity, death

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What are the seemingly accommodating drivers thinking? Waving a cyclist or driver into onrushing traffic is the oddest generosity of all — kindness that can kill.

For example, I have experienced this once or twice a week as I bike from the West Roxbury Y to the new alpine digs in Hyde Park.

Turning left from Quinn Way at the stop sign depends on timing for safety. When cars are racing or just rolling north and south simultaneously on Centre Street (see inset from Google Maps), I wait for an obvious clear shot.

Sometimes I get the oblivious wave that seems at once thoughtful and thoughtless. A driver stops in the nearest lane and dismissively waves me to cross three lanes to head south. I’d like to roll up to the driver’s window and ask what the hell the thought process is.

Invariably, the waver does not seem to notice cars and trucks to the left which would be visible in the driver’s side mirror, as well as more motor vehicles barreling down the hill for anyone looking ahead. Those other drivers would not be able to see me on a bike suddenly claiming a lane in front of them. Smash-o, crunch-o, ouch-o.

The body language of the waver suggests arrogance and noblesse oblige. My interpretation is, “I’m feeling generous and in control of the space around me. I shall deign to let you advance, non-driving peasant.”

That may be putting too find a point on it. Instead and in the least, that driver needs more RAM. Processing the visuals would make it clear that safety and generosity require passing so that the cyclist and on-coming traffic in both directions can see each other. Minimal intelligence would conclude that waving a bicycle into three lanes of moving traffic is, shall we say, unwise.

When I’m safe and in a chair, I have mused on what such drivers are thinking and feeling. I suspect at heart it related to another of my raps, how very few of us are capable of multitasking, yet nearly all of us are sure we are. (See one example of my take here.) If you don’t realize you are not gathering enough information to make a good decision, any check and balance has to come from others.

Too many drivers look only right in front of their cars’ hoods. Simultaneously scanning visual cues in plain sight is the rarity. That way can lead to death or maiming for the pedestrian or cyclist waved into traffic.

Yet almost invariably when I smile but drop my cleated shoe to the pavement instead of following the flicking fingers’ direction, the driver is obviously irritated. I rejected the controlling generosity.

I’ll take the scowl rather than the ambulance ride.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cycling, drivers, Boston

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“Where’s your cape?,” demanded the four-year-old lad. Realizing that I had been sucked into a cos-play vortex with her kids, the mom was very quick to do almost all the lying for me.

I had no idea my long-sleeved Superman shirt — blue with the big old S logo on my big old chest — would be so worthy of comment at the West Roxbury Y. Already two different 30-ish women in two sections had called out, “Great shirt!” and winked.

After my workout, as I sat in the entry room changing into bike shoes, the boy and his slightly older sister had to visit. It wasn’t exactly Santa, but I was their target courtesy of mom. As I passed the clot of families at the pool area, she called to them, “Look. Look. There’s a superhero.”

My youngest is just 16. My days of being even a plain hero to him are behind and maybe ahead of him. Suddenly I had the respect and rapt attention of the kindergarten crew.

They wanted to know just the basic superhero facts. Was I flying home? I said I was taking my bike. Mom added both that superheroes don’t always fly and that I was putting on my special bicycle shoes and my helmet. She was shameless in both making stuff up and entertaining her charges.

I didn’t feel the deceit was too deep or harmful. The son particularly was clearly going to continue to ask the why and how questions today and until he was satisfied, perhaps at age 35. Truth would out.

Well, I do have the big shoulders and obvious muscles. However, instead of the field of jet black hair, I wear some blond cotton candy over my shiny scalp. Had I been five or four, I think I would have wanted to know what had happened to Superman’s hair.

Nevertheless, mom made the mundane magic. Her kids had a seven-minute interlude with Superman right at the Y.

Now I think I feel the need to go fight some crime.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Superman, YMCA, children

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