Smooth as Silk

I woke up in a timely manner and had time to read the newspaper before leaving to meet Trish at Apple. The paper's news about yesterday's travelling out of San Jose Airport concerned me some, since apparently there had been long lines and people waiting 90 minutes to check in. I'd left two hours from when Trish picked me up until my 1 pm flight, which seemed like it might have been cutting it tight.

It turns out I needn't have worried. Traffic into the airport was only slightly worse off-peak-hour normal. The line at the American ticket counter was wrapped maybe four times through the roped-off areas, but all stations were being manned and it moved along quite briskly. I checked in, I guess, about ten to noon, and then had nearly an hour to sit at my gate and read until the plane boarded.

The plane itself left almost exactly on time. Again, I was fortunate that there was only one other person in my row on my side of the aisle, so we had a vacant seat between us. For us relatively tall people (I'm six feet tall) this is a good thing on an airplane! I was actually rather surprised that the plane was not completely full, as holiday travelling season continues to get busier and American offers the only direct San Jose-to-Boston flights.

They showed two movies during the flight, neither of which I watched. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All the Way seemed like a good recipe for some sort of coronary attack. On the other hand, believe it or not, I've never seen It's a Wonderful Life, and I resolved that when I finally do see it, I'm going to see it in a better venue than a tiny screen on an airplane using headphones. (If I'm ever in California on Christmas Eve, the Stanford Theatre shows it every year.)

I didn't get a lot of reading done on the plan, I'm not sure why. I drilled my way through the February 2000 Analog, which had some good stories, and started Sean McMullen's The Miocine Arrow (the sequel to Souls in the Great Machine)), but that's all.

I spent an hour of the flight talking to the fellow next to me, who's another Silicon Valley worker also working towards a CS degree. We actually spent quite some time talking about old movies, and at one point he said, "You really know your Hitchcock, don't you?" Well, only because I saw something like 20 of them last spring. (And I still haven't seen Dial "M" For Murder or To Catch A Thief!).

The flight landed 15 minutes early (!), and the one snag in my day came when I went to get my bag, as it was completely unclear which carousel my flight's bags were coming out on. But when I finally figured it out, my bag had just come out as I got there. So I bundled up and went into the cold to catch the shuttle bus to the T.

The MBTA is North America's oldest subway system, having started service in either 1898 or 99. Sitting in the Airport T station, it occurred to me that Boston is really so much older than almost everything one sees in the Bay Area. The train stations are often unrenovated brick and tile enclosures, with the ceilings supported by unadorned steel I-beams. It seems that the brick is usually painted white, and it's not uncommon to see the paint flaking heavily. Painted pipes run along the walls and corners of the stations, too.

The trains themselves have undergone periodic replacement over the century. The Green Line has had one major replacement and one minor one, and presently uses cars which are essentially identical to those used by San Francisco's MUNI transit system, modulo some cosmetic details and coloring. When I was a kid, the cars looked more like older-style streetcars, although not as open-air as the SF cable cars.

Walking around Boston or driving around Greater Boston it's clear that the area was built up according to very different rules from those which governed the Bay Area's evolution, with narrower roads, no particular "system" to the layout of the streets, and a haphazard upgrade to support automobiles, often at odds with the substantial pedestrian traffic around. Freeways probably aren't much less abundant than in the Bay Area, but it feels like there are more major arteries (which are narrower!) which are away from the freeways. Everything feels much closer together. Indeed, where a 30-mile drive barely takes you halfway from San Jose to San Francisco, here it can take you from Boston to deep into the suburbs, possibly beyond the Greater Boston maps.

Then of course there's the cold air, the salt on the road, the bundled-up train passengers (apparently I arrived right after a Boston Bruins game had let out), and the snow on the ground. The trees are bare and your breath freezes. Boston in the winter time.

The train ride to my Mom's house was simple enough, and I arrived a little before 11:00. Mom has been sick with a persistent cough for over a week, but waited up for me anyway.

My room was pretty much as it had been left the year before: The single bed which isn't quite long enough for me, the old desk I inherited from my Dad at some point. Two bookcases filled with my Mom's books. A leather butterfly chair. Some boxes and blankets and assorted things. Not much left of me in that room, since I deliberately removed it all several years ago.

The gray wall-to-wall carpet was put in at my request (covering up hardwood floors) in tenth grade, and the walls were painted from blue-green to off-white. The door doesn't close fully. (It's an old house - maybe pushing 80 years old. Few homes in the Bay Area are that old. I think the majority of them were built after World War II.)

It's good to be home, with all its unique strangenesses.