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Back in Boston

~ . . . the home of the bean and the cod, not to mention liberalism, history, the "shot heard 'round the world"–and holding it together after the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Back in Boston

Category Archives: How we’re coming along

New York, New York: M&Ms, statues, horse-drawn carriages, and water towers

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Manhattan, New York City

During my whirlwind 48-hour-long stay in New York City, my 11-year-old requested that I bring her back some of the magnificently colored M&Ms from the huge M&M store in Times Square (the Hershey’s store is just across the street).

As it was her sole request, I granted it.  One pound of M&Ms cost $12.95.  I hope she enjoys them immensely at this price!  These are colors that you can’t get anywhere else (I think they all taste the same but I’ll need to do some major sampling in order to say this definitively).

IMG_5553

There are some new statues . . . with signs saying “Do not climb” . . .

Statue, Columbus Circle
Statue, Columbus Circle

. . . and old statues that would be hard to climb . . .

Another statue in Columbus Circle.
Another statue in Columbus Circle.

Columbus Circle is completely different . . .

A non-Georgian crescent at Columbus Circle
A neo-Georgian crescent at Columbus Circle.

. . . but a block away there are the traditional horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.

IMG_5575

If you want to ride in a horse-drawn carriage, you should get your ride in soon;  there’s a movement afoot to ban all horses in the city for their own well-being.

I stayed in my old building at 82nd and Riverside in the apartment of my friend Steve, whose apartment is four stories above my old apartment and who was the reason I moved into the building in 1994.

Here are the views from his apartment, which are similar to the views from my old apartment, only higher up and more spectacular.

The sun setting over the Hudson River and New Jersey Palisades:

View of sunset over the Palisades from my old building.

And the view east towards Broadway, the water towers like huge beasts crouching over Manhattan.

View east from my old building.

God, how I love water towers!

Water towers over Broadway, Upper West Side of Manhattan
Close-up of water towers over Broadway, Upper West Side of Manhattan

More comments in tomorrow’s post about changes in New York due to the administration of the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and whatever else I come across!

New York, New York: traffic and the arts

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

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Banksy, Manhattan, Manhattan theatre, Manhattan traffic, New York

On a lamp post at the corner of 77th and Columbus, there’s this sign:

Mayor di Blasio doesn't want you to be hit by a car.
Mayor de Blasio doesn’t want you to be hit by a car.

 The new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and his Police Commissioner, William Bratton, (both from the Boston area) are already making changes. Recently, three people were killed by cars at or near the same intersection of 96th and Broadway on the Upper West Side within nine days. (I used to live two blocks away, and can remember seeing the aftermath of two pedestrians who were killed outside my building on Broadway.  It’s a sobering thing to witness.)

There’s a general feeling in New York that enough is enough.  Too many pedestrians are being killed by cars.  NYPD has put up signs asking people to wait for the walk sign before crossing the street, which of course is only dealing with part of the problem.  The biggest part of the problem is the two tons of steel coming at you despite the fact that you’re crossing the street with the walk sign.

But I will say, speaking as someone who has experienced both New York and Boston traffic, I was stunned–and impressed–by the changes to New York traffic since I lived here.  I remember a lawless place where drivers and cabbies drove like maniacs. I remember cabbies cutting across four lanes of traffic to beat out other cabbies to pick me up, and that every single day I had close calls with cars barreling their way through hordes of pedestrians who were crossing legally, missing me and other people by inches.

What I saw today and yesterday was mostly orderly traffic patterns, no speeding, no running red lights, as is done all the time in Boston.  Clearly, a lot has already been done to calm traffic but clearly too, more needs to be done if pedestrians are being mown down so frequently.

Speaking of New York streets, the London artists Banksy recently spent a month in New York creating street art, doing one piece a day during the month of October. My friend Steve showed me one on a wall at 79th just east of Broadway. The owner of this building had installed a piece of plexiglass over the art and a security camera to preserve the art.  

Take a look, below.  Do you know what this child is doing? Any guesses beyond pounding a red pipe with a mallet?

Banksy up close
Banksy up close

Here’s a larger view.  You will see how clever Banksy has been in incorporating his little figure with something that was already there to make his art:

Banksy's little fellow and a "test of strength."

With a wider perspective, you’re able to see what Banksy’s little fellow is doing:  a “test of strength,” also known as a “high striker,” such as as you’d see at carnivals and at county and state fairs.
My time in New York would not be complete without a trip to the theatre.  I was lucky enough to get one of the very last tickets to Sweeney Todd at Lincoln Center. Here’s the English actor Emma Thompson taking a curtain call.  And yes, it was fabulous!IMG_5617 Emma Thompson in Sweeney Todd

One last photo from this day:  a boat on the Hudson, with the opposing view of buildings and water towers reflected in the sky above the river:

IMG_5629Boat on Hudson

And that’s all for now! Have you spent time recently in New York?  Is there anything about the city that surprised you?  What is your favorite thing about New York?  Your least favorite?  Please comment below.

Here are three earlier posts on what I observed in New York, here, here, and here.

New York, New York, energy, opportunity, real estate, and a couple of cupcakes

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

≈ 4 Comments

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Manhattan, New York City, Upper West Side of Manhattan

People always talk about the sense of energy in New York, and they are correct.

New York is a high-intensity place, with an implicit promise of great opportunity so that every waiter can become an actor, every lowly proofreader can become an editor, every person who is “good with numbers” can become a hedge fund manager. As the song says, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

An ad on the subway summed this up very nicely:

You came to New York with one clean suit and a firm handshake.

“You moved to New York with an MBA, one clean suit, and an extremely firm handshake.”

Besides the sense of opportunity (which admittedly was battered by the recession of 2008), there’s also the fact that New York is always changing. You turn your back for a second, and old buildings are being torn down and new buildings are rising in their places to create a new city-scape.

IMG_5547City canyons

For my overseas readers, New York City is comprised of five boroughs (mini-cities):  Manhattan, which is what many people inaccurately think of when they say “New York City,” Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.  Manhattan has and always will be the jewel in the crown, but Brooklyn is now the place to live. In the past ten to twenty years, there’s been a huge exodus to Brooklyn as the Manhattan middle-class and artists were driven out by high prices, and Brooklyn is now where you will find much of the energy, arts scene, and people with children.

When I lived in Manhattan for fifteen years in the 1980s and 90s, you wouldn’t go to Brooklyn on a dare. Brooklyn Heights, on the waterfront south of the Brooklyn Bridge, was fine, but Cobble Hill and Park Slope were sketchy, Prospect Park was definitely iffy, and most of the rest of Brooklyn was just too dangerous to spend much time in if you didn’t have to. Artists were starting to move to Williamsburg, across the East River from Manhattan, in order to live in huge warehouse space and lofts that were much cheaper than in SoHo (South of Houston Street) which were being bought up by large numbers of celebrities and wealthy people.

In Manhattan, the West Village was gentrified in the 1970s and the 1980s by gay men. At that time, the Alphabets (Avenues A, B, C, etc., on the Lower East Side) were the place to get a foothold in Manhattan real estate, or at least a cheap apartment to rent.  Later, Chelsea, on the west side from about 14th to 30th Streets, became the place to live.

What’s happening now, according to my friend Steve, is that people are getting priced out of Chelsea, and are moving north to Hell’s Kitchen, west of Midtown and north of Chelsea.  This was the part of town where the Irish gangs historically lived and the murder rate was high. I remember looking at an apartment for rent in Hell’s Kitchen; it was a dark, dingy, depressing railroad-style apartment with a bath in the middle of a tiny kitchen. I didn’t take it. Prices are now soaring in Hell’s Kitchen.

On this, my second day in New York, I traveled down to Chelsea on a very clean subway to Chelsea Market, a huge renovated space with amazing food such as at this bakery.YUM!YUM!

One store had the most compendious collection of spices I’ve ever seen.  Have you ever seen such mouth-watering colors?

Spices from around the world.

Spices from around the world.

Speaking of eating, I saw this sign in the Village:

Only in New York City could three weeks go as fast as one.

Only in New York would the nineteen days from February 17 to March 7 be considered “a week.”

I met my best friend from high school whom I haven’t seen in many years because she and her family live in California. Her son, a constructor of crossword puzzles, is the second youngest person ever to have a crossword published in the New York Times. At the advanced age of 17, he was addressing an annual convention of crossword enthusiasts in Brooklyn.

After taking the subway back to Manhattan and walking another 50 blocks (you do a lot of walking in New York City), I saw this sign in a Barnes and Noble:

Order by 11 a. m., get it by 7 p.m.!

No waiting for your books!

A Chinese laundry (and yes, they are called “Chinese laundries,” the same way you’d talk about “Korean markets,” or you’d say, “There’s a Korean on the next corner”) had a man working in the front window.  He was ironing the shirts at the right of the photograph, then putting the finished, ironed shirts to the left.  Great marketing!

Window dressing!

Window dressing!

One more post to come!

Je regrette quite a bit.

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in How we're coming along, Humor/humour

≈ 4 Comments

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questions and answers, what I regret

With thanks to Iota Manhattan, one of my favorite bloggers, for getting me started on this list:

  1. Name a guilty pleasure.
  2. If you could change one thing you’ve done in the last week, what would it be?
  3. What’s your middle name? (go on, we’re all grown-ups now, it’s not embarrassing any more)
  4. Can you, with Edith Piaf, say “Je ne regrette rien”?
  5. What fairy story character do you most identify with? (don’t over-think this one).
Chocolate truffles, yum!

Chocolate truffles, yum!

1.  Guilty pleasure:  dark chocolate truffles with chocolate mousse inside, dusted with cocoa powder.

 

2.  Change one thing I’ve done in the past week.

I wish I’d booked a flight EARLY EARLY EARLY when they were so much cheaper so that this week I’d be meeting up with my dear cousin Julie and any and all of my English and Canadian relatives someplace HOT (Portugal?  The Canaries?) and listening to my Uncle Frank do karaoke in the British bars

Even the Three Wise Men are snowed under!

Even the Three Wise Men are snowed under!

during this school vacation week instead of battling temperatures in the teens and cascades of snow here in New England!  This trip is a total pipe dream because we can’t afford to go on any major trips–saving our pennies for our summer trip back home to England–but I can dream, can’t I?

3.  Middle name:  Ann.  Nothing wrong with that, yeah?

4.  Can I say “Je regrette rien?”

Non, pas du tout, je regrette beaucoup!  There have been so many things in my life that turned on a hair and that sent me in a new and sometimes interesting and sometimes not-so-interesting direction that it’s so hard to choose. . . .

Take, for example, my applying to business school.  Going to business school was not something I had ever conceived of doing–I thought maybe I would get a Ph.D. in English or an M.F.A. in creative writing or maybe even be a farmer–but after graduating from college, going to business school was what you did if you were a relatively pulled-together young woman, and I was also getting a lot of pressure from my then-significant (insignificant) other to go to business school in order to provide a life of unending bon bons (see above, #1) and luxury at the expense of my own happiness, so to shut down this conversation FOREVER I said I would apply to ONE business school ONLY and then you have to SHUT THE BLEEP UP about my going to business school!

So I took the GMATS and thought I didn’t do well enough to get into the top business school which is the only school I applied to because I knew I wouldn’t get in and so this matter would be ended FOREVER, and then surprise surprise surprise I DID get in and I went because as everyone said you don’t say no to Harvard, and I had a miserable two years along with everyone else studying 15-16 hours a day and after graduation instead of working for McKinsey or going into investment banking (which would have been a total joke because I am an English-style socialist and I would have wanted to spread the wealth all around especially for the hard-working people at the bottom), I went right back into publishing, only this time it was New York book publishing, which was a real step up from before I went to business school when I worked as a lowly textbook sales representative in North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and was sliding off icy roads most of the time so in some ways business school paid off big-time.

I got a really cool job as an acquiring editor for a top New York book publisher which I loved and several of my authors got on the New York Times bestseller list, but then five years after I started at this particular publisher I got a horrible, jealous, bigoted new boss who fired me when I was eight months pregnant, and then I had my first baby and also fell in love with  New York, and I thought that this is the best thing in the world, looking after my daughter, then my son, then my second daughter, and I realized that what I really wanted to do in life was to raise my kids and write about England and America and family and farming and parenting and also maybe write manuscripts for two thrillers and most likely more so that’s what I’m doing.

HBS and the Head of the Charles race.

Head of the Charles race and Harvard Business School.

snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs

5.  Fairy story character I most identify with.

Snow White, because without over-thinking anything I’d really love having seven brothers, uh, dwarves, to hang out with.

I always wanted to be in a family of 12 kids like my grandfather (he was second youngest), or have 12 kids myself, neither of which happened, so having these dwarf-brothers would be the next-best thing, that is, if I were Snow White!

The suckiness of having to model good behavior to your kids

06 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along, Humor/humour, Parenting

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

air conditioning, heat, hot temperatures, Modeling good behavior to kids

No, this is not me, but you get the picture.

This is not me, but you get the picture.

OK, this is what it was like here in Boston, Mass, over the last weekend.  It’s been bleeping hot, and because I have English genes I really, really don’t do well in the heat. It’s 93 in the shade, and all anyone in my household is doing is sweating.

We don’t have any AC going on because it’s been a really long, cold spring and the ACs are all tucked away in their little winter home in the laundry room, and those of us who have the time to get them into the windows have dodgy or scrawny backs (i.e., my mother, me, and my 10-year-old), and those of us who have the back strength don’t have the time (The Other Responsible Adult In The House, abbreviated as TORAITH) or the inclination (my two teenagers).  So everyone in my house is sweating and miserable.

On Sunday, after three horrendous days of steamy heat, I had the chance to go see a movie with friends.  This was a highly acclaimed movie that combined two of my favorite things: 1)  it had a literary premise so I could feel virtuous about spending my money, and 2) it was set in New York City, a place I adore.  But more importantly, it was a movie with . . . sigh . . . air conditioning, because going to a movie in the summer in America is really all about the air conditioning.

But before I headed out for the movie, I had to take my 18-year-old daughter to the AT&T store to get her a new iPhone 5, which is part graduation present and part replacing her old iPhone 4 which she recently dropped.

In purchasing the new phone, I had to provide ID, which meant showing my driver’s license to the store employee.  Which is the point at which he told me that it had expired. On my birthday. And before you start Facebooking me to wish me Happy Birthday, I have to tell you that my birthday was in February, so I’ve been driving illegally for four months.

This situation was made far worse because my 18-year-old is on the brink of getting her driver’s license at the same time that her mother has been driving on an expired license.  Not exactly good modeling behavior on my part.

So I slunk home and had TORAITH take over for me at the AT&T store with an up-to-date driver’s license.

I immediately got online and filled in the form for the Registry of Motor Vehicles, hoping that I could get something saying that I could legally drive to the movie an hour-and-a-half hence.  After I answered some questions, the form told me that because I had no felonies, misdemeanors, unpaid parking tickets, or moving violations, and because I was just such a generally wonderful person, I could apply online instead of having to actually go to an RMV office.  All I’d have to do was print out my online preliminary new driver’s license and I’d be on my way to the movie and its air conditioned comfort.

But then, my payment using my credit card didn’t go through.  Then the second card didn’t go through.  By this time, TORAITH had returned home, so I used her credit card.  Then that one didn’t go through though it had worked satisfactorily at the AT&T store just half an hour earlier.

So here I was, with a statement from the RMV saying that I was eligible to get my new driver’s license online, but my payment had been refused on three credit cards that I knew to be completely okay.  So I figured out that the RMV’s payment system must be on the blink.  But I was still okay, wasn’t I?  They said I was eligible, so that must mean legal, right?

I could almost feel the cool air of the movie theatre wafting over me and the hairs on my arms lifting in the cool cool breeze.

And, as the friends I was going to meet asked me:  What are the chances I’d get into an accident driving to and from the movie, when I’d never had an accident in my entire driving experience?

The answer:  none.  Or almost none.  And I had the print-out saying I was eligible to renew online which had to count for something.

“Just go!” chimed in my soon-to-be-licensed driver who’s heard multiple lectures from me about the need for insurance and obeying the rules of the road.  “It’s their mistake that their website won’t take your card.”

Well, yeeeeeeessssssss.  But . . .

So:  should I stay or should I go?

There are so, so many things I’ve given up since having my three kids, and here I’m not just talking about sleep, money, and sanity.  I’m talking about all those things I did to model good behavior to my kids.images

o  PK (pre-kids), the words “f*** a duck” used to roll off my tongue for major and minor pains and disappointments and believe me, it helped whatever pain I was feeling.

No more.  AK–after kids–I became so good at not swearing that I’d managed to convince my two older kids up until they were 8 and 10 that the “F” word was “fart” and the “S” word was “shut up.”

o  When I went out PK, I used to have several drinks over the course of an evening.

Now, I never have more than one beer or glass of wine, and that’s over the course of several days or even a week or else my kids start telling me that I’m an alcoholic.

o  When I needed a good old pity party Pstrawberry-ice-cream-like-ben-and-jerrys-05_2K, I’d run a hot bath and sink into it with a  pint of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate fudge ice cream and People magazine, preferably with (insert a sigh of longing here) Brad Pitt on the cover.

IMG_1857

o  And I never, ever, ate broccoli PK.

Now, AK, those little green “trees” as I’ve learned to call them, frequently pass my lips although I find them as disgusting as I did before having kids.

Yuck! Steamed broccoli!

Yuck! Steamed broccoli!

But in terms of this movie:  I’ve already given up so much.  Can’t I just have this one thing–a really great movie in air-conditioned, ice-cold comfort?

The opening credits were starting in 45 minutes, and I had a 30-minute-drive to get there.  I had to go.

But then my daughter said, “Who cares about their stupid rules, anyway?”

Clearly, this thing of modeling good behavior hasn’t worked out as well as I would have liked. But I can’t give up modeling good behavior now, in front of this about-to-be-newly-minted driver.

I called my friends and told them that I couldn’t go.  Waves of disappointment spread over my hot, sweaty body as I thought of the hours ahead in our steamy house.

This modeling good behavior, although a useful thing, was for the birds.

And I couldn’t even say, “f*** a duck”!

What pleasures of your life have you given up in order to model “good behavior” to your kids?

Boston Marathon memorial: Bucket brigade of flowers

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Marathon bombing memorial

The memorial on Boylston Street.

On Sunday afternoon I went down to the memorial to those killed in the Boston Marathon bombing.

I’ve been feeling completely shattered ever since it happened last Monday afternoon, over a week ago.  It’s exactly the same feeling that I had in 1993 when I looked out of my office window down Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and saw the smoke rising behind the Pan Am building from the first attack on the World Trade Center, and then eight years later when New York was attacked a second time on 9/11/2001 which I wrote about in “New York, a Love Story.”

Sunday was a lovely spring day here in Boston, sunny, in the 50s, with daffodils, cherry trees, and magnolias in full bloom.  I went down on the T to Arlington Street, one stop past Copley, which was still closed due to the bombing, and walked the several blocks towards the finish line.

Six blocks of Boylston Street were shut off with metal barricades.  At both ends were memorials to the three–now four, with the murder of the MIT policeman–people dead and 260 people injured, some horrifically.

There was a real mix of people at the memorial, probably about half native Bostonians, half foreign tourists, judging by the accents.  All was quiet except for a man who stood at the front of the barricade laughing loudly as he talked on his cell phone. After a few minutes of hoping he would realize how hurtful his behavior was, I finally said to him, “Please don’t laugh.  People have died here.” He muttered “sorry” and slunk away, cell phone in hand.

The memorial was filled with bouquets of flowers of all sorts, three large white crosses for the three victims of the bombing, running shoes, Boston Marathon medals and t-shirts, posters, signs, and American flags.  A man who appeared to be a Vietnam vet was managing the memorial, taking flowers from bystanders and putting them in place.

Taking bouquets at the memorial.

Taking bouquets at the memorial.

At one point he called out, “I need volunteers!”

I raised my hand, and about fifteen other people joined in. I had no idea what he wanted us to do, but doing something–anything–was better than doing nothing at all except feeling this overwhelming sense of sadness.

Men in hazmat suits on Boylston Street near the finish line.

Men in hazmat suits on Boylston Street near the finish line.

The guys in the hazmat suits had told him that they needed to remove the barricades and clear the street for traffic soon, and so he needed our help moving the memorial to a semicircle of pavement about 25 feet to the left.

We started with the flowers.  A line formed of about ten people passing individual bouquets of flowers along like a bucket brigade.  It was beautifully choreographed and very moving, but I’m not my father’s daughter for nothing, and he always liked getting things done the most efficient way possible, so I scooped up bouquet after bouquet of flowers, probably two dozen, in my arms and carried them to the new memorial site, then repeated the process many times over the next hour.

The new memorial took shape, all the flowers at the back, a section for baseball caps, one for t-shirts, another for posters.  The three white crosses for the two women and the little boy who were killed in the bombing were moved, then surrounded by multitudes of stuffed animals.

Remembrances for the two women and young boy, and the MIT police officer.

Remembrances for the two women and young boy, and the MIT police officer.

The MIT policeman didn’t have a cross, but someone had put his initial, “S” for “Sean,” next to the initials “M” for Martin, the 8-year-old boy, “L” for Lingsi, the Chinese graduate student, and “K” for Krystle, the exuberant restaurant worker.

After all the emotion, I was drained.  I thought about walking the two miles home along the route of the Marathon, but instead I wove a circuitous path in the opposite direction to the Public Garden, probably the loveliest spot in Boston with its willows, landscaped vistas, and Swan boats.

The Boston Public Garden

The Boston Public Garden.  A swan boat is going under the bridge.

I walked through Back Bay to the bridge leading to the Esplanade next to the Charles River.  On the other side of the river was Cambridge, where the MIT policeman was murdered and the terrorists lived. I cut back into town at Kenmore Square with its iconic neon CITGO sign (see below) and nearby Fenway Park where the Red Sox play.  There was a game going on, and hordes of people on the street.

Paul Revere's supposed admonition, "The British are coming, the British are coming," is echoed here.
In Kenmore Square I came across an advertisement from the sneaker company New Balance which used the words that Paul Revere supposedly said as he rode on horseback to warn citizens between Boston and Concord: “The British are coming!  The British are coming!”
Boston MBTA bus after the Marathon bombing

Boston MBTA bus after the Marathon bombing.  Copyright Virginia A Smith

Even the buses are carrying the message as Bostonians are fighting back against the assault to our people and our city.

 

 

Boston on lockdown

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

≈ 2 Comments

Boston under lockdown

Boston under lockdown

It’s really eerie here in Boston.

Since the older terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing was killed in the small hours of the night and his younger brother went on the loose and is now the subject of a city-wide search, Boston has been on lockdown.  All forms of public transportation have been shut down, including the “T” (the Boston trains and buses) and Amtrak, businesses are closed, and people have been told to stay indoors.

Katie, my 18-year-old daughter, and I were in Western Massachusetts for the past 24 hours, attending an Open House at a college to which she was accepted when the two suspects were located and the older one killed.  Hearing about Boston being on lockdown this morning was just surreal.  We had planned to spend the entire day at the college, but instead we headed out almost immediately.  When we arrived back home, there were lots of hugs from my mother and my 10-year-old daughter.

When we left Boston yesterday for our trip, we drove through Watertown, where the shoot-out took place.  It is now closed off, so we had to take a route to the south of Boston, rather than driving in directly from the west.

The Massachusetts turnpike (the "Mass Pike") near where the Marathon started on Monday morning.

On the Massachusetts turnpike (the “Mass Pike”, also known as I90) near where the Marathon started on Monday morning.

In Hopkinton, the town where the Marathon started 26.2 miles from the finish line in downtown Boston, there was virtually no traffic going into Boston.

There was even less traffic on Route 9, the major  thoroughfare to our part of town and to downtown Boston. Traffic is always fierce on Route 9, but not today.

No traffic is coming out of Boston.  Everything is shut down.

No traffic is coming out of Boston. Everything is shut down.

Yesterday morning, right before we left for the college’s open house, Katie went to the Church of the Holy Cross where the memorial service for the victims of the Boston Marathon bomb explosions was taking place.  She was hoping to get into the church and see President Obama speak not only as Commander-in-Chief but in his new role as “Comforter-in-Chief.”

She was number 1,050 in line, but unfortunately they only let in the first 1,000 people.  While she was waiting, she took this photo which captures four major aspects of the past three days:

1.  The Boston police who worked selflessly to protect the city.  Here they are protecting people attending the memorial service.

2.  The medical personnel from Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in the van who, along with doctors and nurses at Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s, Boston Medical Center, and Massachusetts General Hospital, helped save the lives of countless people.

3.  The American flag at half-mast

4.  The Prudential Center, Boston’s second tallest building, which was a block or two away from the Marathon finish line.

copyright Katie

Photo taken by Katie.

She missed seeing President Obama speak in person, but those of us in Boston or involved in the Marathon have his words of comfort to listen to as many times as we need to hear them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vguxffX1ftg

The Boston (Marathon) Massacre: Why would anyone do this?

15 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along, US vs UK

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2013. Bombing at Boston Marathon., Boston Marathon

Some of the over 27,000 runners.

Some of the over 27,000 runners.

I was out for 3 hours today on Beacon Street, watching the Boston Marathon which passes 1/2 mile from my house.

We stood on the street  24 miles into the race, 2 miles from the finish line, as  people from all around the world ran the oldest marathon in America.  This took place in Boston, one of the US’s most historic and safest cities.  It was Patriot’s Day, cherished by people from Massachusetts which celebrates the colonials first taking on the Redcoats on April 19, 1775 and which signalled the start of the American Revolution.

The weather was perfect–in the 50s, not too hot for the runners, and sunny.  The mood of the crowd was upbeat as we cheered on people from Kenya, Ethiopia, the UK, Nebraska, Japan and probably every state in the Union and country in the world;  runners on foot and in wheelchairs,  and members of the armed forces in camouflage carrying 100-lb packs.

Many of the people running in the Marathon were raising money for a charity–a children’s hospital, a cancer center–and there was no political agenda to anything today.  There was only the joy of putting one foot in front of another and doing the best that you could in order to say that you ran and finished the Boston Marathon and perhaps raised money for a good cause.

My daughter Meg in red, and her friends Mame-Diarra whose parents are from Montana and Senegal, and Julia, parents from Boston and New Jersey.

My daughter Meg in red, and her friends Mame-Diarra and Julia.

The first women runners at mile 24.

The first women runners at mile 24.

The first men runners at mile 24.

The first men runners at mile 24.

IMG_0984

More of the Marathon runners.

And then, at 2:50 p.m. two explosions at the Finish Line.

And all I could think of was the other innocent victims of violence, in London during the IRA bombings and the terrorist attack on 7/7/2005, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria, India, Indonesia, Somalia, and too many places around the world.  And in the US, the Omaha City bombing on 4/19/1995;  the World Trade Center attack in New York City on 9/11/2001; and the slaughter of children in Newtown, Connecticut, on 12/14/2012.  All massacres of innocents.

Bob Lescher, my literary agent, R.I.P.

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Virginia Smith in How we're coming along, Writings and writing

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Bob Lescher, Bob Lescher literary agent, Robert Lescher, Robert Lescher literary agent, Robert Lescher RIP

Courtesy, New York Times

Courtesy, New York Times

There was a half-page  obituary for Robert Lescher in the New York Times this morning.  Bob was my literary agent;  he’d been ill for over eighteen months and was no longer actively working on my behalf but still, his death was a shock.

Bob was one of the “grand old men” of literary agenting.  Many of the authors he represented were people who changed the American landscape:  Robert Frost, quite possibly the best-loved American poet; Dr Benjamin Spock, America’s most trusted pediatrician;  the artists Andrew Wyeth and Georgia O’Keeffe;  Madeleine L’Engle, author of young adult classics including A Wrinkle in Time; thriller writer Thomas Perry; the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer;  the humor writer Calvin Trillin; the food writer M.F.K. Fisher, the children’s author Judith Viorst, whose Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is an American children’s classic.  On the international front, he represented the English jockey/thriller writer Dick Francis, the English literary biographer Michael Holroyd, and the Dalai Lama, whom Bob took on as a client because, as he said, “Jesus was unavailable.”

Bob was a throwback to a more gracious, literary, and literate publishing world.   “Courtly” was the word I used when describing Bob to my friends;  “courtly” seemed to be the word many people, including the New York Times obituary writer, used to describe him.  When one of his oldest and most revered clients died, Bob went to the funeral.  I spoke to him the next day.  “That must have been very sad for you,” I said.  Bob, uncharacteristically, said nothing. He was too much of a gentleman to say the actual words:  the person was a force, and not in a good way.

He had a gently wicked sense of humor about everything he did, including getting editors personally invested at an early stage in his projects.  Rather than send an entire manuscript directly to editors, he would first send a brief email, describing the book in one or two sentences, then saying, “I would so love to share this new author with you.”  By securing the editors’ request to see the manuscript he was, as he said, “making them complicit in their own demise.”  As he said this, he would catch your eye and grin.

Bob was eighty-three when he died, and had worked in publishing since his early twenties.  As a first-time editor at Henry Holt, he’d gone to the London Book Fair and had come back with only two projects.  His boss said something along the lines of, “Only two?”  Both became bestsellers in the US.  I don’t remember the first, but the second was Dick Francis, whose posthumously co-written books still hit the bestseller list.  By age twenty-five, Bob had become Holt’s editor-in-chief.

Bob came into my life shortly after my father died in 2007.  I had written a thriller that was deemed too “edgy” by at least fifteen New York literary agents, and I was looking for an agent who believed in me, and my ms.

I decided that I would look for a young, edgy New York City literary agent who wouldn’t be put off by an edgy, New York City thriller, but on a whim, I sent my manuscript to Bob Lescher.  I’d never met him, but he was one of the few agents that the publisher and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins, where I had worked as an acquiring editor, had spoken of with unadulterated respect.

Bob read my manuscript over Easter weekend, and called me on Easter Monday.  He loved it;  he wanted to represent me.  I asked if the other half of Lescher & Lescher, his wife Susan, had also read it.  She had, and she’d loved it, too.  I happily accepted his offer, and became part of his stable of authors.  There was no contract to be signed;  he said that contracts weren’t necessary between people of good will.

Finding Bob was propitious in many ways;  I needed an agent, and I also needed a father-figure.  This was just after Easter, and my own father had died several days earlier, on Good Friday.  My mother and I were with him to the end during a torturous year-and-a-half of hospitalizations, rehabilitations, more hospitalizations, more rehabilitations.  At least once a week my dad would ask, “Have you found an agent?”  My getting an agent was clearly very important to him in the small amount of time he had left.  Three days after he died, I had an agent.  And not just any old agent;  I had Bob Lescher, an agent’s agent, the sort of agent you could only dream of having.  And, coincidentally, who had daughters named Katherine and Margaret, as did I.

When I first met him, he was living and working in a brownstone on East 84th Street. Over lunch, he told me stories.  One was about editing Alice B. Toklas, life companion of Gertrude Stein.  When he showed up for the first time at her apartment in Paris’s Left Bank, he knocked on the door and saw it slowly open.  He looked out, but no one was there.  Then he looked down (Bob was quite tall), and there she was, “a tiny woman with a moustache.”

Over the course of five years, he visited Alice in Paris for one week every year to edit the fifty pages she’d written during the previous year.  Slowly, slowly, he helped her craft her autobiography, working in her apartment under a gallery of Matisses, Cezannes, Juan Grises, and Picassos.

During our lunch, Bob mentioned that his first wife had written a memoir in which he figured. He said, with some humor, that she had referred to him as “B.”  From the way he spoke, it was clear that “B” was not short for “Bob.”

With some trepidation, because I didn’t want to find out about reasons not to like my agent whom I liked very much, when I got back home to Boston I Googled “Robert Lescher,” but found almost nothing about him.  He was under the radar.  Finally, I was able to discover that his first wife was Mary Cantwell, whose essays in the New York Times I had loved. I bought her book, hoping there wouldn’t be much material on “B.,” but what I learned was that, up until the end of the marriage, he was a magnificent husband and continued to be an excellent father to their children.

When I last saw Bob, in June 2011, he’d just moved from 84th Street on the Upper East Side to West 21st Street in Chelsea.  His landlord at 84th had so liked having Bob as a tenant that he or she (I can’t remember which) brought Bob with him/her when he/she relocated to Chelsea, never having raised Bob’s rent in all the time he’d been a tenant.  Bob had been offered the garden apartment in a gorgeously renovated brownstone.

I took the train from Boston to hand-deliver my second manuscript.  It was a swelteringly hot day.  Bob proudly showed me around his new office, his bedroom at the front, a small lawn at the back, and a lot of room in between for him and the two terrific women who worked with him, Carolyn Larson, also an agent, and Barbara.  In the hour I was there, several of his clients and friends stopped by to congratulate him on his new digs, and he chatted amiably and offered them a brand of fruit juice he’d just discovered, seeming to derive an immoderate amount of pleasure at introducing his visitors to this elixir of the gods.

He took me to lunch at his favorite restaurant, his arm through mine as he walked unsteadily to a cab.  Upon arriving, we were immediately ushered to a table in a clearly desirable corner of the dining room. He ordered a large glass of wine,  downed it in one gulp, handed the wine glass to the waitress, and asked for a refill. That amount of wine, consumed so quickly, would have flattened a lesser man.

He told me about his weekly poker group with several men of his generation, mystery writers and the owner of a mystery bookshop.  I told him about spending my summer after college at the house of John Wain, Oxford professor of poetry, and finding a letter from Philip Larkin in his bicycle basket, and he told me more about finding Dick Francis and publishing him for the American market.

We went back to his office, then he walked me to 7th Avenue and hailed a cab.  He opened the door, kissed me goodbye, and promised to read my manuscript at his soonest opportunity.  I watched after him as he walked slowly back down 21st Street.

A week passed, then two, then three.  Finally, I screwed up my courage, and called.  Carolyn said that he hadn’t been able to get to my new manuscript, but that he would, soon. I was at the top of his list.

Another call, and word that Bob had fallen, and was in rehab.  It was clear that this fall hadn’t happened recently. Then another silence;  Bob was unable to get to the phone but I was still at the top of his list.  I feared the worst.   And then came the word from Carolyn that Bob had declined to take on my new manuscript.  By then I had suspected that we were over;  that most likely, he was over.

Last spring, while I was living in Cambridge, England, I read a post on the internet written by one of Bob’s other authors that his agent, the very kind and welcoming Carolyn Larson, had died.  I emailed the office, and several days later, heard back that Carolyn, only 70, had died in her sleep, a complete shock to everyone.  It must have been devastating to Bob.

I do not know what will become of Lescher & Lescher without Bob and Carolyn. I can only hope that perhaps one of his three daughters will take it on, because it is a fine name that is worthy of continuing.  I will always feel honored that I had the privilege of being one of Bob Lescher’s authors.  I so miss that rich, cultivated voice over the phone, choosing his words so carefully, and his wry, sometimes wicked, sense of humor, and the knowledge that he would do absolutely everything in his power for me.

 

Stormy weather–now and forever

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Virginia Smith in How we're coming along, US vs UK

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Barack Obama, Climate change, hurricane Sandy, Mitt Romney

Courtesy Spencer Platt, Getty Images

First, I want to say thank you to my family in England and Scotland, and to my friends in both the US and UK who contacted me asking how we’d weathered the storm here in Boston.  The answer is, we are fine, but so many are not.

New Jersey, New York (especially lower Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens), Connecticut, and West Virginia took the brunt of the storm.  We had some trees down in the Boston area and some loss of power, but nothing like the places mentioned above, where people lost loved ones, their homes, their possessions, their access to food, electricity, and water, and their sense of security.

Courtesy, ABC News

My dad, a farmer’s boy from Derbyshire, a scholarship student at Cambridge University, and later professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, had long warned about the hazards of climate change.

A friend, a former reporter for the Boston Globe, emailed me this afternoon saying, “I wanted to let you know that I have been thinking about your father in the last few days, with all the talk and articles in the Globe about potential flooding and damage in Boston in coming years as a result of global warming. I remember very clearly his work and his comments about this likelihood. He was a man of so many talents and insights.”

My friend interviewed my father for an award-winning series, spent a lot of time with him,  and got to know him quite well.  She also read his manuscript, Living Safely, a combination memoir of his life as a farmer’s boy and research professor and a warning about global hazards due to climate change.

Houses burned down in Queens, New York.  Courtesy Spencer Platt – AFP/Getty Images

In his last years of life, my father became deeply concerned about the dangers posed by climate change caused by human activity, including extreme heat, storms, floods, drought, earthquakes, escalating CO2, and the rising level of the ocean.

Today happened to be the ecclesiastical celebration of All Saint’s Day in honor of those who have departed this earth, a time when I especially remember my father and what he was passionate about:  trying to preserve our planet.  (You can read more about him here.)

I want to leave you with this video of Mitt Romney, who has been busy lying through his teeth and mocking people, including my father, other eminent scientists, and those of us who are increasingly frightened about what climate change will mean to the ecology and preservation of the earth. (Please copy this into your browser if the link doesn’t go through–it’s pretty powerful).

http://grist.org/politics/the-most-brutal-ad-youll-see-this-election/#.UJZlV95xNKU.facebook

To those in the US, on Tuesday please vote for our incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will continue to do his best to preserve our world and reverse, or at least slow down, climate change.

President Obama in Brigantine, New Jersey.  Courtesy Jewel Samad – AFP/Getty Images

And to those overseas, please know that many Americans share your deepest concern about the need to protect this fragile earth, our island home.

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