metaquotes | Loving Boston

I love it even when it's having an off day, or being intentionally off-putting, and it staggers me how much sometimes. I mean there was this day, a while back, when I was out with sovay, and we were looking for an article of clothing it ought to have been easy to locate, a very simple thing; and we went to the Goodwill and the Garment District and the other Goodwill and the AIDS Awareness Thrift and poked our head into a couple of the places which give you sticker shock and none of them had this garment; and we had sore feet and a time limit both for when the garment was necessary and for when I had to go away and go to dinner; and we had the requisite encounters with a person with unusual public boundaries in the other Goodwill and with a clerk who did not find us very trendy in the Garment District; and it was coming on to rain, very hard and cold and sudden. And we were sitting on a bench in Central and my shoe-strap had just given up the ghost and the drops were starting, and the gentleman behind us was discussing, in tones appropriate for football cheering, the care and maintenance of his methadone addiction and the various gruesome things it had done to his body. Just then I spotted a bus, with the thrill of a wild-bird watcher: the bus that is supposed to go from my neighborhood to Central, which I had never before managed to see in the wild, let alone use, because it has no relationship of any kind to its schedule, ever, and of course I had no reason to be taking it, because I was not going back to my neighborhood for dinner, and I fully expect that I shall never see it again. And my other shoe-strap was starting to give way, and I hate shoe-shopping more than anything else in the universe, and all I could think of, the only thought in my head in that moment, was I love this city, I love this city, oh how very much I love this city.