The Magic of Childhood

When I was a child, my grandfather would often preach at Park Street Church in downtown Boston when he was in town from California. I remember so clearly running wild through the ancient cemetery that the lobby let out onto, watching fearless squirrels gather acorns fallen from the enormous oaks. Boston was, to me, a magical land of lush gardens and old brick buildings crouching low on the busy streets. Tall glass skyscrapers and cement monoliths, all sitting atop the troglodyte world of the cavernous T train system. It was going down trash-strewn stairs into the tile-lined tunnels, dark beneath the earth; the screech and hiss and rumble of trains approaching—the rats scattering beneath the tracks; something so ancient, and something so modern. I traveled under the roads and the bay in dirty train cars with old, hard smears of bubble gum and the odd assortment of New Englanders. Immigrants speaking different languages, prim middle-aged women dressed from the Land’s End catalogue carrying canvas library totes, punks and skinheads, and the multitude of college students in worn army jackets and thick wool scarves and torn levis. This was where I encountered the greater world—greater, anyway, than my small, homogenous New England town with it’s little town green and single strip of stores. Boston was rich with history and beauty and it felt worn and dear as a favorite coat. Most of all, it was thick with the mystery of the adult world which I was excluded from. Busy people with lives so foreign to mine, buzzing about their day and intersecting my life for the space of a train stop or two. Then they were off, or I was, and the lines of our lives spun onto different routes. Exiting the tunnels, I’d emerge back into the sun and the city, finding myself somewhere entirely new, like being birthed.

I moved to Atlanta when I was 13, which is just about the age when the magic begins to wear off of childhood—the small tears and chips on the corners appear and, more than that, we realize they’ve been there all along and we were just not aware of them. I think for this reason, Boston remained an untouched perfection, dewy with wonder. It was a fairy tale put away on an unreachable shelf. It was the motherland from which I had been exiled. It lay untarnished, the patina of childhood still firmly in place. It is no wonder that it was not all that I expected when I moved back ten years later. But while I was there, for moments or hours, or sometimes days, Boston occasionally became exactly how I remembered it.

When I walked, the first time, to my interview with the head hunters that would eventually help me get my job, I didn’t know that I’d find myself walking past Park Street Church. But as I turned the corner, just there onto Tremont Street at the edge of the Boston Commons, there was a man who played the saxophone in front of the cemetery fence by Park Street Church. Rounding the corner from South Station, the notes would hit me and lift me straight up. Give me butterflies. I would be giddy with memory and magic and the way in which his playing united the entire street into a cityscape—even the sun was a conspirator in it’s near perfect slant through the old oaks--the way it fell just so on the bricks of the sidewalk. And everyone within hearing was suddenly captured in the net of his music, as if they were all there just for me, a sound stage I’d walked on to. A movie set. Everyday that he was there and playing I would smile so wide I felt like I was being turned inside out. Because I was the guardian of a sweet, sticky little secret: this Boston that I found myself in, weaving in and out and around with the breath of the sax, it filled me. It nourished me. It made the smallest, most interior part of me shiver with joy.

It was as if all of what I had missed, all the magic of New England that lived in my memories, was rolled into this one instant on Tremont street, brought back to me with the flow of the music. The feelings of a New England fall and then the winter that I remembered so clearly: the changing colors, the early dark, the chill in the air, the sting in the nose; chapped cheeks, slush seeping through the seams of shoes; that slightly metallic smell of a scarf that has been wrapped tightly against lips and nostrils—beaded and hot with moisture; the smell of snow; days spent fort building and clumping heavy wet mounds together into snowmen; the sting of snow as it crept over the collar of my jacket and hit my neck while I made snow angels; the oddly sharp pain on numbed skin when hit with a snowball; the crunch and give of day-old snow.

New England still held these wonders for me, unchanged in their beauty. These moments where time bent back on itself and I was wide-eyed and enraptured once again. But mostly, Boston was a city where I worked, and couldn’t afford to live; a place still closed off to me even when I had come back all this way after many years. Inaccessible. It was as if I was trespassing. As if it was no longer mine.

But those windswept moments on Tremont Street, with the saxophone reaching out to me, pulled me into the world, included me in the web of humanity from which I felt so distant. I was caught up in that precise moment: asphalt gritty beneath my foot, swing of my quick walk, rush of air on my cheek, rough wool against my chin, and music, music, music floating me back into a time when I was realer than I’d been in awhile.