Ease up - tourists are people, too

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Ease up - tourists are people, too

It's late July and time, it seems, for tourist-bashing. Last week in this paper, Joe Sciacca got all a-flutter over the Old Town Trolley and Beantown Trolley and the new Duck Tours, which he says are the reason you can't get from point A to point B anywhere in this city. Congestion and gridlock are the fault of trolleys and "lard butts from Nebraska," don't you know?

This week, in Boston's other major daily, columnist Patricia Smith wrote that tourists "clog the Artery, babble over maps in restaurants, snap endless pictures of sunbleached gravestones" (why this would bother anyone puzzles me), and continues on to bemoan their "maddening practice of standing directly in the middle of a downtown sidewalk at 5 p.m., their heads upturned and mouths open, gazing reverently at 'Look, another old building!' while juggling camcorder, bottles of Evian, and several hot squiggling children." Huh?

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If New Yorkers are always this nice, we'll take Manhattan!

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If New Yorkers are always this nice, we'll take Manhattan!

NEW YORK - I awaken to sirens these days and horns blaring and scrapes and thuds, trucks picking up or dropping off something. City sounds, foreign sounds to me.

There's an air-conditioner in the bedroom, but we sleep with it off and the window open. Closed, this place is hermetically sealed. We could be anywhere - in a barn, in a bubble.

I want to remember where I am: New York City.

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So that's life in the Big City!

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The news is full of mayhem - all over the country, all over the world. That's what news is. Man bludgeons man. Man hurts and hates and avenges and rebukes and betrays and alienates.

We drive from Boston to Manhattan and as the local radio station fades and the New York one becomes strong, only the names of the victims change. The stories are the same: Child shot; man stabbed; woman raped; teens killed; girl attacked by gang; terrorists vow revenge.

Bad news is like the moon at night. You can't get away from it. It follows us all.

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Suburbs still fulfill the dream

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New to this city, to this country, he wanted to know about suburbs. What they are, exactly? What they are like?

"They're safer than cities, are they not?" he asked. And though I said, yes, they are, I didn't explain that this is not their essence; that suburbs weren't born out of a need for safety. Suburbs, after all, have their roots, not in today's fears, but in yesterday's dreams.

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Taking time to live real life

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PROUT'S NECK, Maine - The DNA men are inside. It's 5:30 p.m. and they have been at it all day: trading information, speculating, extrapolating, talking nuclei and double helixes, trying to decipher the genetic code of life.

It is noble work they do. Their research will improve, even save people's lives.

But in the meantime, there's today, Oct. 3, a glorious, sunny, warm Indian summer day, set down in the middle of fall.

And they are oblivious to it.

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Ordinary people must end Haiti's extraordinary hell

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This isn't what you want to read on a Sunday morning, or on any morning. It's yet another horror story about suffering people thousands of miles away. We don't want to know about any more suffering people. We've got enough problems: not enough money to make ends meet; not enough jobs to go around.

Cities exploding. Hope imploding. Locked doors in the house, even when you're home. Locked doors in the car, even when you drive. No stopping to help anyone; no looking around. People weird, ready to attack. Trouble in the schools; trouble in the streets; homes aren't havens; church doors are locked; Cancer, AIDS, hurricanes. We don't need more problems!

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Vacation memories become real again

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I thought I remembered it exactly: my father taking the ceramic dog-bank down from the chest where it sat every day of the year; my mother shaking quarters and dimes and nickels onto the chenille bedspread in their room; the three of us dividing and piling and counting.

Get a knife, they would tell me when the dog had expelled its final coin. I would run into the kitchen and return with a dull blade and poke it through the slit on the top of the dog's head and dig out dollars that were stuck inside, that could be felt more than heard. When the bank was empty, we held our breath and let our eyes savor the piles that stood like silver volcanos on the spread.

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The place where time stands still

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The dream was a subconscious effort to hold on. I dreamed about flowers, fields of vanda orchids, red hibiscus, pink plumeria, hibiscus, anthuriums, birds of paradise. The scent of the flowers followed me out of the dream, along with the heat of the sun, coconut trees rustling in the breeze, waves crashing against the shore.

My husband told me I sang in my sleep. "Hello, sweetheart, aloha. Aloha from the bottom of my heart." "You were actually in tune," he joked. I have never sung in my sleep before. I have never sung this song while awake before. But then I have never felt so removed from reality, so at peace with the world, so content - not in years, not since I was a child.

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Another change, a memory lost

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I don't get sentimental over the closing of stores anymore. Things change. Things change so often and so fast that change itself isn't as dramatic as it used to be. One store pulls down its shades, and a few weeks later another opens its doors, and for the most part, I hardly notice. But I used to. I used to mourn the passing of the places I frequented as a child. I carried a mental picture of the way things were, the way I thought they always would be, and I expected life to honor that picture. I wanted the places I loved to stay just as I remembered, untouched like the room of someone on a vacation, who at any moment may return.

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Today's bigger shops and malls not really better

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Take a simple thing like directory assistance: You dial 411, give the name and address of a person whose phone number you want and an operator asks, "Are you sure you're spelling the last name correctly? We show nothing under that spelling." And before you can say, "I'm sure it's correct," there comes a click followed by a recorded recitation of a wrong number, all for the bargain price of 34 cents. If the recording were a live person, you could interrupt at this point…

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