Cambridge: summer; changes to a poem
Cambridge: summer; changes to a poem
Yesterday and the day before were perfect, and Boston doesn‘t get many perfect days. The temperature was around 80ºF/27ºC, with sunny skies and low humidity.
Carol and I drove to Nahant, a suburb to the north and east of Boston, for a late lunch. We sat on an outside deck, eating fish and mussels, while watching a crowd on the beach below. The view was east toward Marblehead and Gloucester. I’ve been back long enough so that I got a little sunburned.
On the way we stopped and I took the above photograph looking across the Charles River to the Boston skyline.
There is a dam, with locks, at the mouth of the Charles, where it enters Boston Harbor, near our former home at Constitution Marina, to control flooding and maintain water levels in the river, which was subject to drying out at low tide. Thus the Charles is almost a lake at its mouth. Less than a quarter mile up river--to the right in the photograph--it is much narrower.
I had expected more boats would be sailing on such a fine day; but in August, many Bostonians are away, on Cape Cod, in Maine, on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket Island, and the colleges are not in full session.
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For reasons that I cannot explain for a while, I added the words,
probably kind
but, after all,
it is only a job to them
to the third stanza of the poem about the death of the man I thought of as my grandfather, which begins, “I’ve grown to like gray days”.
That is the way I originally wrote the poem, and when I had reason to look at it yesterday, I was surprised to find them absent.
I’m sure you’ve already noticed.
Sunday, August 9, 2009