Wednesday in the Park

Today it's raining though my column for this week evokes a sunny day. It's raining and Wall Street is crumbling but I look around and see this:

1) People moving about and smiling at each other's dogs just the same.

2) Acts of kindness: the liveried man outside the big hotel notes my troubled face when I find his lot full and takes my car for me and parks it smack in front and charges me just ten bucks though I am gone nearly three hours.

3) The chance always for a smile: The Gypsy Rose School of Pole Dancing is right there beside the fancy photographic studio where I am going to get my picture taken because the Girl Scouts have asked me to as a former Leading Woman. Ruth Bramson, the great new CEO of these Girl  Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, wants to activate all us former Leading Women; hang our portraits and get us back to mentoring those 55,000 young ladies, which is more than fine by me. Last year, when I offered a class for their Beyond Bars program I had so much fun my face hurt from smiling. (Beyond Bars brings Girl Scouts and Brownies into our two women's correctional facilities so they can have their troop meetings with their mums.)

But I guess what I should say is that I saw these things rather than that I see them because it was yesterday really and the sun shone just as it did the day I wrote this column which you will also find at the top of my home page here.

So let's have some pictures of that day now: The smokers referred to there, looking so calm and iconic you'd think they'd been there forever, like the hillside they sit on. 

The new and the old: Boston City Hall finished in 1968 and therefore brand-new in our minds,  juxtaposed with the Old North Church of "One If By Land Two if  By Sea" fame built almost 300 years ago: 

 

 

And finally a man waiting for what he needs to feel normal...

 

    

...which is all any drinker is trying to do when he drinks: Just feel normal. Just feel the way the rest of us feel when we get up, come sunny day or rainy day. We stand and stretch and the molecules sing and the bright blood froths and even the dourest among us must think - HAS to think - "Thank you God, for quick life and this new day to enjoy it in."

May He - or She - watch over us all today, the dogs and the pigeons, the smokers and the drinkers, the pole dancers, the troop leaders and the elected officials especially in whom we have placed so much trust.

When the Last Pope Came He Came First to Boston

When the first Pope ever came to the States in the person of John Paul II he came first to Boston and said Mass on the Boston Common and boy did it  pour - just rained cats and dogs on that patch of real estate where autonomous powerful women were hung for witches, where over the centuries assembled the Redcoats and the famous evangelists, the America Firsters and the Sacco-Vanzetti supporters, the Legalization of Birth Control advocates and even little Judy Garland before a crowd of 100,000 just two years before her death at 47, pre-embalmed as she was by the sauce by then, poor lambie.

Everyone loved that John Paul II because he was so young-seeming and athletic; because he looked like he might have played the lead role in one of the Tarzan movies from the old days.

I was 30 when he came. I could have gone to see him and would have, in a heartbeat, and brought my two babies in their strollers too, but the little one was SO little and still subject to such fits of supper-hour suffering I just couldn’t chance it. It was that and the torrents of rain that kept me home.

In a way though I feel as if I did see John Paul, up close even. I say this because my Seventh Grade boyfriend Perry “Mike” McDonough was by then a Secret Service agent and the very first person in the country to touch that great man’s hand when he clambered out of the plane at Logan airport. Mike was about the cutest middle schooler you ever saw, with wavy blond hair and eyes of a fish-tank blue. We stopped dating in Ninth Grade but 25 years later rekindled a connection that conjured those early years back in living color thanks mostly to Mike’s amazing memory. We see each other maybe once a year, going to reunions or concerts or visiting one another’s houses with our respective mates and I just love him, both for his positive outlook and his faithfulness of heart.

So here on this warm East coast Friday a toast: to Former Agent McDonough, now retired, and the Secret Service too and any Pope at all with the courage to come to see his flock here in the land of the Freethinkers; here in the land where something like 80% of the people polled say they don’t believe in Hell but they just KNOW there’s a Heaven and they’re prett-y darn sure they’re going there. And now back up to this picture of our last Pontiff back in ’79, doing for the first time here in the States what he always when his plane landed, with my old friend Mike to his right, looking simultaneously both fiercely alert, highly tuned-in and as sweetly humble as a shepherd at the Manger.