Postcard from Boston Garden

POSTCARD FROM THE GARDEN

     It’s good to go home from time to time.  Especially in the winter.  There’s nothing like a few days of February in Massachusetts to remind you why you left.  It’s 13 degrees.  I was going to say ‘above zero’, but at that temperature what difference does it really make.  When I went jogging yesterday a frigid gust swept up the street, slowing me almost to a stop.  Through layers of clothing it chilled me right to the skin.  �
      It’s been snowing forever this season. There’s two feet on the ground, plowed into peaks and ridges on street corners and in parking lots.  Snow is like a rock star.  Great when its young – but it doesn’t age well.  It’s only been a couple of weeks, but it already has a Keith Richards kind of look to it.  It’s mottled, speckled, past its prime.  When the sun is out, the glare is blinding.  Winter is a challenge here.�
     Wheeler and I arrived Wednesday night.  We had tickets to see the Celtics in the Boston Garden – though that’s not what they call it anymore.  In what has become a commonplace act of prostration before the whore goddess of ‘branding’ the place is now called TDGarden.  I don’t know what a TD is.  I’m hoping  it’s not a boner pill.  But I was raised here so for me it’s Boston Garden, or just the ‘Garden’.  Yet I got a head’s up on that too.  I pulled up to the toll-booth in the Sumner Tunnel.  “Afternoon” I said.  “Hiyowahya”, the guy responded, in his native tongue. “Am I heading toward the Garden?”  He looked at me.  “You mean, the GAH-den?”  I stand corrected.  It is, in fact, and always will be, the Gahden.
     Alas, in truth, Boston Garden is gone.  The Celts played there from 1928 until 1995, when it closed and they moved next door to the Fleet Center.  Had to happen I suppose.  The old building didn’t even have air-conditioning.  Although the four walls are new, the spirit lives in the avatar of the Floor.  The new Garden, even with all the hi-tech screens and graphics, has the feel of a shrine when you walk through the portal and gaze down on Red Auerbach’s old parquet floor, built from scraps in the 40s, and transplanted here from the old building.  The Leprechaun still grins at mid-court as he has for decades.  In the rafters overhead are the championship flags – ten alone from ’59 to ’69.  And the jerseys.  Auerbach, Cousey, Havlicek, Larry Bird.
     In Boston sports is more than entertainment.  Boston is an ethnic city.  They live in neighborhoods that are Irish, Italian, black.  The Red Sox, Celtics, and the Bruins hockey team are part of the tribal identity. They’re crazy about these teams.  We saw the Celts play – and beat – the New Jersey Nets.  When the Celts re-took the lead in the 4th Quarter the crowd was riotous.  And this is Wednesday night – playing the Nets.  �
     I’ve been gone from Massachusetts for decades but I’m still a fan.  I actually have a brother who doesn’t like the Celts.  Of all the loathsome apostasies, he roots for the Lakers.  I hold it against him – in a small way.  I can’t understand it.  An ancient team, an historic pageant of accomplishment – and he prefers the Lakers?  And while we’re on it, what is a Laker, anyway?  There aren’t any lakes in LA that I’ve ever heard of, and if there was one, you wouldn’t let a dog swim in it.
      The occasion for the trip is my father’s birthday.  He’s 82.  He’s doing pretty well.  Although you have to watch him carefully to detect that he’s doing anything at all.  He watches a lot of TV, takes walks and rides around town.   But the house looks good (except for the snow), and he’s healthy.  I think he’s reached a plateau where boredom is accepted as the blessing of few problems.
     Like a lot of old people, he tells the same stories over and over.  Yet he seems to enjoy the latest telling as much as the first.  It is hard to say whether he really doesn’t know he’s telling me for the tenth time that his divorcee neighbor is sleeping with a Brazilian or that the father of a childhood friend of mine, who used to live a few houses down, was all those years a raving manic-depressive – or whether he in fact enjoys some secret dispensation of old age that disdains the conversational etiquette of the young.�
     Whenever you spend a few days with my father, you become a captive of sorts.  This season he is inexplicably enthused about old musicals.  For much of the time that we congregated in his den, he had on some DVD narrating the fabled era of MGM musicals.  I watched Gene Kelly perform Singing in the Rain probably five times.  He can become pedantic about it.  He stops me in mid-conversation to ask who was Gene Kelly’s favorite dance partner?  No, he prompts me, it wasn’t Cyd Charisse.  Alright, I give up.  Its Fred Astaire, he informs me.  I don’t know where this is coming from.   I didn’t think he even liked movies.  We couldn’t get him in the car to see the King’s Speech.  Yet here he is holding a seminar on Gene Kelly.  I guess it could be worse.  We could be watching My Cousin Vinny.
     The culmination of the weekend was dinner at an old restaurant the family used to frequent when we were young.  It’s an hour away.  He’s letting me drive.  This is new.  He has an immaculate Lexus that he washes, oh, about every single day.  He has a season ticket to the car wash, and no matter what he paid, it was a bad deal for the car wash.�
      But tonight he’s OK with my driving.  I think this is a good sign.  He’s letting go a little, learning to play better with others.  I too am learning to be a little nicer.  In years past when he was a passenger, I would drive up quickly on the cars in front, just to watch his right foot thumping the floor board.  I’ve quit doing that – mostly.�
      There is a big family gathering at the restaurant, nieces, nephews, and a proliferation of new spouses and girlfriends.  I have no recollection of this place at all.  It makes me uneasy that my youngest brother speaks so fondly of it.  How much of my childhood have I simply repressed?  The conversation is lively.  The menage of aunts and uncles growing ancient, brothers growing a touch gray, a newly married niece, my brother’s four little children – the intersection of these souls around a long table makes for a pleasant evening. The mid-winter night, just outside the window, is howling cold.  The food, a buffet of some sort, looks like it’s been sitting under a heat-lamp for a week, yet life really couldn’t be better.  And the last I checked, the Celts are still on top.