TRAVEL & COMMUNITY
Bastille Day in a French Village
Last summer, we missed the usual Fourth of July celebrations in the United States because we were traveling in France. But we looked forward to July 14, Bastille Day, or La Fête Nationale. Their national holiday also commemorates a “revolution of the people” and honors the birth of a new republic.
The big day found us in a small place…
Brother Blue’s Gift
Sometimes when you’re lost in a strange new place, somebody finds you. That’s the way I intersected with Brother Blue (real name: Hugh Morgan Hill), the itinerant storyteller of Boston and Cambridge, who passed away this week. I was pretty young when I first met him, a recent college graduate who had just moved to the big city. It was a time of transition for me, not only from college to looking for work, but also from a fairly rural area to a bustling urban environment. Also, as sometimes happens in such periods, I had left behind a guy I loved to pursue my dreams.
Here is what happened. It was a chilly autumn evening in Harvard Square, and…
Don’t Walk
The other day, while driving in a part of a nearby city (accurately) known as Commercial Drive—you know, several miles of box stores and chain restaurants, I saw a pedestrian. I was waiting at a light and an unexpected flash of movement and color on my right distracted me. I glanced over, startled. A teenage girl had somehow threaded her way through the idling cars, without benefit of a crosswalk, and was climbing over waist-high steel barriers. I watched with concern …
SwissAir 111 Memorial, Bayswater, Nova Scotia
“They have been joined to the sea and the sky.”
Every now and then, a glint of something grabs our attention: a place or image that is vaguely familiar, words we’ve heard somewhere before. Driving along the side of a bay on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia in summer, I spotted a sign for this memorial, commemorating the “all hands” loss of life from a Swiss Air crash in 1998. There was no town nearby, nor house. Only a narrow, worn, two-lane back road from nowhere to nowhere…
Friday Night Fish Fry
Now that I’ve sampled a few Upstate New York Friday Night Fish Fries, one thing that especially strikes me about them is the venues. Quite often they are held is places that are not normally restaurants…
