At first there was the idea: a home away from home.
A place where spring might be found in February, and in my mind that’s all I could envision.
It was November, which always felt like the darkest month of the year. Thoughts of the coming spring, even if we hadn’t even entered winter, kept me going. As did the idea of a place in Boston, away from the campus of Brandeis. Having persuaded my parents of the wisdom of purchasing a condo in the South End of Boston, where real estate was just beginning to take off, I’d wasted no time in starting the search. This song led my heart, and I remember hearing it for the first time in the music store on the second floor of the Copley Place Mall, back when such garish haunts still had a home in Copley.
IT FELT LIKE SPRING TIME
ON THIS FEBRUARY MORNING
IN THE COURTYARD BIRDS WERE SINGING YOUR PRAISE
I’M STILL RECALLING THINGS YOU SAID
TO MAKE ME FEEL ALRIGHT
I CARRIED THEM WITH ME TODAY
The fall day on which I started the hunt for our Boston condo began in rainy form. Living on campus at Brandeis at the time, in a castle from whose balcony the city of Boston appeared like some little glowing visage of Oz far in the distance, I longed to be in the middle of the city, longed to find a place there as I’d dreamed all those years ago on one of our first visits to Quincy Market. Somewhere in my head, amid the magical little bull markets and twinkling trees, beside the wavy cobblestone walkways, and the centuries of history, I felt my own history being built.
The year was 1995, and I’d taken my father’s offer to start looking for a place in Boston at face value, hopping on the commuter rail into the city, and walking into the South End to the first real estate place I saw on Tremont. Expecting some introductory small talk, some vague promise of a meeting in a week or two, I suddenly found myself walking out of the office and onto Clarendon with the handsome real estate agent, beneath a suddenly-blue sky and the late afternoon sunlight.
Perhaps it was all part of his master plan, but the first offer was a smaller place right around the block on Clarendon Street. I remember a brick wall in the kitchen area, where a single small batch of dried, almost desiccated flowers, hung in a sad sort of way. It wasn’t ideal, and there wasn’t a T stop nearby, but the notion of waking up in white sheets, when the sun poured in and illuminated every crack and crevice of brick, was rustically appealing in its simple way. The idea of sharing that small space with someone suddenly imprinted itself upon my mind, an idea of making a home, and of finding love there.
The second home we saw was deeper into the South End. Even further from any T stop, it offered the most space, but was unfortunately divided into several smaller rooms lending it a claustrophobic feel, where no light reached some of the inner-rooms. That old real-estate adage about location, location, location ran through my head, and as we walked the long way back to the real estate office, I felt a little despair that we were down to one more option.
NOW, AS I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP
THIS I PRAY
THAT YOU WILL HOLD ME DEAR
THOUGH I’M FAR AWAY
I’LL WHISPER YOUR NAME INTO THE SKY
AND I WILL WAKE UP HAPPY
It was dark when we visited the condo at Braddock Park. Located on the border between Copley and the South End, it was in a brick building along the Southwest Corridor Park. Steps from the orange line, and a few more steps to the green line, it was the closest to just about everything. In the night, I could locate where we were based on the twin hotels of the Marriott and Westin nearby, and the John Hancock Tower slightly beyond them. Their lights broke the blackness around us. It felt like we were on the doorstep of Boston. More than that, I somehow felt like I was home.
The condo was on the second floor, which rose even higher than a typical second story based on the fact that the first floor actually started about a dozen steps above the sidewalk. Coupled with high ceilings, we were indeed at the doorstep of Boston, and somehow looking down over it. Even without being there during the day, I could sense there would be good light. It was a floor-through unit with bay windows in the front and the back. A bit foolish to make such an investment without seeing it at both day and night, but something just felt right about it. There, in the darkness of a Boston evening, it felt right. Just me, and the city, and the night.
When November arrived, and the cold days settled in, it was time to close on the condo. My Boston dorm had taken on a decidedly dreary aspect ~ both in its suffocating communal shower, where a house centipede was lurking around every corner, and in the coldness of its painted cinder block walls, the sad little sink and mirror by the tiny window.
I WONDER WHY I FEEL SO HIGH
THOUGH I AM NOT ABOVE THE SORROW
HEAVY-HEARTED TIL YOU CALL MY NAME
AND IT SOUNDS LIKE CHURCH BELLS
OR THE WHISTLE OF A TRAIN
ON A SUMMER EVENING
I’LL RUN TO MEET YOU BAREFOOT
BARELY BREATHING
On the day we closed on it, the wind was strong and the air was chilled. It was November, and we’d turned past the point where warm and sunny days could still heat the earth. For such a transformational event, it felt oddly uneventful, and as my parents signed all the papers, and the condo became our second home, the little set of keys hardly seemed like they could open the portal to the next part of our lives.
It would be a couple of weeks before I moved in, and in those weeks I steeled myself for a life alone. Now that the deal was done, there was no reason for the real estate agent to hang around, and I was left by myself, with all the trappings of an exciting single life in Boston, but none of the happiness or excitement or hope. Gradually, by little and insubstantial bits of furniture old and new, I furnished the condo, in minimalist fashion by necessity, and sparsely by tentativeness. In those first few days, I wanted to take it all in in its most simple and basic form ~ the warm, newly-refinished hardwood floors, the bit of exposed brick wall in the bathroom, the little counter that separated our small kitchen area from the rest of the front room, the marble mantle around the fireplace from who knew how many long years ago.
While the main room had lovely recessed lighting in its ceiling, the bedroom was bereft of such luxury. A little fringed lamp was all I had to illuminate the space at night, and I slept on the thin almost-mattress of a cot we brought in until a bed could be ordered and delivered. There wasn’t a television or a stereo in the place, and I didn’t need or want for any. In that stillness and quietude, I forged a love for time spent alone. Somehow I knew it would be the singular love affair we all need to find to be ok with whatever ways our journeys wound.
AS I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP
THIS I PRAY
THAT YOU WILL HOLD ME DEAR
THOUGH I’M FAR AWAY
I’LL WHISPER YOUR NAME INTO THE SKY
AND I WILL WAKE UP HAPPY
The idea of sharing this space with someone, or sharing a life with someone, was the way I romanticized in those days. And especially those nights. I played this song over and over, longing for such a scene, longing for companionship, longing for the fix that would heal my heart. I wasn’t quite sure how it had been broken, there simply came a day when, upon examining it, I realized that yes, there were cracks, there were fissures even as I didn’t recall the jolts that did it.
Was it the man who scraped my face so viciously with his stubble, the first man who ever kissed me, the man who took that special moment and in his alcoholic madness in turn took my innocence? I honestly didn’t think he had broken it ~ even when we saw each other randomly a year prior to that, when he told me it just wasn’t working out before I even realized we were actually dating. I was so young and naive, I didn’t even know that.
Was it my favorite Uncle who laughed at me when I was a kid, when in a rare moment of excitement I showed him a flower arrangement I had made and he asked with a smirk if I was gay? I couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, and still I remember the sting of it, the way I hid in my room and cried until my Mom asked me what was wrong as I was avoiding my favorite Uncle and I just blurted it out in pain and anguish.
Was it when one of my only friends in college jokingly and derisively said he hoped I wasn’t going fag on him when I innocently pointed out the moon on our way back from dinner one night?
I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t any single event, maybe it was the gradual erosion of our lives, the mean stuff and tough stuff of life that eats away at all of us, some more than others, some much more harshly than others, until we reach a point where our hearts are so delicate and worn that they break at the silliest and most trifling of things. A culmination of continual little heartaches resulting in a break that is, at that point, almost a tender sort of relief.
IT’S NOT TOO NEAR FOR ME
LIKE A FLOWER I NEED THE RAIN
THOUGH IT’S NOT CLEAR TO ME
EVERY SEASON HAS ITS CHANGE
AND I WILL SEE YOU
WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT AGAIN
Then, at the not-so-ripe age of twenty, in that rather lovely year of 1995 ~ a loveliness I would come to appreciate more and more as the other years went by ~ those little breaks and cracks had forced me to rebuild a stronger fortress, a defiant set of armor that would steel me against future heartbreak. I needed that whenever I descended and entered the city. Only within the brick walls and the lofty vantage point over Braddock Park did I feel safe enough to let down my guard, to be myself and to be ok all by myself. It was in that way that I shaped a new sense of home.
My adult life was forged there, for better or worse, and it prepared me for hardships and celebrations and love and loss and loneliness and betrayal and redemption and survival. All those facets of living the fullest life, when we are brave enough not to shy away from those feelings.
AS I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP
THIS I PRAY
THAT YOU WILL HOLD ME DEAR
THOUGH I’M FAR AWAY
I’LL WHISPER YOUR NAME INTO THE SKY
AND I WILL WAKE UP HAPPY
Home is a habit, and sometimes you have to make it up as you go.
Home is stability and safety, even when your own heart invites in all sorts of dangers.
Home is a quiet place of refuge when the wind whirls in wicked ferocity, when the rest of the world deserts you, when you have to face the demons all by yourself.
Home doesn’t have to be a physical space bound by wood and clay and windows, but when that place forms the background and base for those moments when you realize what home is, it can’t help but take on some of that history, to become imbued with some of that spiritual matter that we shed as we grow.
There, in that Boston wilderness of a heart tamed by a solitude and stillness, protected from another brutal winter by centuries of brick and mortar, buffeted by the history of a city defined by its singularly American story, of revolution and rebellion, of defiance and devastation, I made a home a quarter of a century ago.
I WONDER WHY
WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT AGAIN
I WILL WAKE UP HAPPY
