Where am I, you ask?

Clue: I love that dirty water...

I found my friend Jennifer's post yesterday on where she literally is, in the country, in the world, quite interesting. I happen to know where Western North Carolina is, just as I know where Greater Boston is (naturally), but it's interesting to think about how one can read a blog and have only the faintest idea (and not always the right idea) where the writer is in the world. Ah, you Internet, you confuser of borders! And wasn't that geography class a long time ago?

Even when we were in school ... I went off to school in England for a year, oh so long ago now, and when I was asked where in America I was from, would at first say Boston, naively thinking that a city of half a million would at least have name recognition.

Nope.

Massachusetts?

Nope.

You know what got the nods? "Next to New York."

And I'm not just trying to knock the English. No one back home knew where I was going, either. Once we established that I wasn't going to be going to school in London, the response to "Kent" was generally, "Where's that?" You don't know our geography, we don't know yours.

The more time passes, the more I recognize, or perhaps admit, how many things there are that I don't know. I'm pretty much at peace with it, too. Some things I'll learn, but I'm never going to get it all. That's okay.

But if you don't know where Boston is, or much about it, and you want to, read on. Here are the random facts that occur to me (deity-of-choice help you: this is no way to learn about a place).

Boston is the capitol of Massachusetts, in the Northeast region of the United States. The Northeast includes New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), and goes farther down toward the mid-Atlantic region, though I'm not sure exactly where to draw the line. Outside my purview, anyway! They're relatively small states: you can drive across Massachusetts, east to west, in about two hours, and north-south in an hour.

Boston is a harbor city, and if you ever fly into Boston's Logan airport and notice you're flying low over the water, try not to worry: the runway starts really close to the end, there, but a plane hasn't gone into the water in, oh, a long, long time.

Now, there's Boston, the City, and there's Greater Boston, which is what people tend to mean when they say Boston. The population of the City of Boston is close to 600,000, while Greater Boston is almost 4 and a half million, so it does make a difference. I don't live in Boston, but I do live in Greater Boston.

Historically, Boston has a lot going on, not even going into what the Native Americans were doing before the Mayflower brought the Puritans over and landed in what would soon be called Massachusetts (we have a lot of Native American place-names, and a lot of English place-names, around here). Plimoth Plantation is a short distance south of the city of Boston, and there's all sorts of pre-United States history here: Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere's ride*, the Salem Witch trials, and more.

*Thanks to Longfellow's poem, I can give you the date without looking it up. It's so easy to remember things if they rhyme or are set to music!

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the 18th of April in '75,
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

I may have some of the punctuation wrong, but I know the words are right. I learned that in grade school. Amazing. That's 1775, by the way, for any non-Americans who are of course forgiven if they don't know America's birthday is 1776. Paul Revere rode through the countryside shouting, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" and the minutemen got ready for battle.

America's first public school (Boston Latin), college (Harvard), and subway system (the MBTA, called the T) are all here. Technically, Harvard's in Cambridge, across the river, but it counts as Greater Boston, so you see what I mean about that? Then there's the library: according to its website, the BPL was both "the first publicly supported free municipal library in the world" and "the first library to allow its citizens to borrow books and materials". Not too shabby.


The carving along the top says, "Public Library of the City of Boston Built by the People and Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning".

Boston, Greater Boston, eastern Massachusetts, is relatively compact and green. We have four distinct seasons that we like to complain about. Our favorite season is the next season: "I can't wait until it's..." Everyone does agree that autumn is lovely, but the leaves, which turn beautiful colors, red and orange and yellow and all shades in between (especially the maple trees) and which people come from far away to see, were always better last year.

Boston has a lot of hospitals, and a lot of colleges and universities. It has a reputation for being traditional and puritanical, yet Massachusetts is the first state in the US to legalize gay marriage. We have many old buildings*, yet a disturbing number of people are knocking down old houses to build ridiculously large ones in their place (McMansions).

*Old by American standards, that is. When I was a child, a house was built down the street from us and, twenty years later, it was still called "the new house". (It probably still is.) The house I grew up in was about one hundred years old at the time, nothing by European standards, old here. The building I live in now was built in 1745. Not so old in Europe, but extremely, extremely old here.

Then there's the accent. That Boston accent, the one that turns "park the car" into something like "pahk the cah". The Boston vocabulary, which makes "wicked awesome" a compliment. I don't know, there's plenty more, but I don't speak it myself, I can't even fake it well; I do better faking an English accent. And by the way, if you think you've heard it in the movies, no, sorry, the movies almost always screw it up. You really have to come here to surround yourself with the real thing.

Finally, here's one of my favorite bits of trivia about Boston. There's a light on one of the buildings that gives a very simple weather forecast, with a little rhyme so you can remember what light means what weather:

steady blue, clear view
flashing blue, clouds are due
steady red, rain ahead
flashing red, snow instead

The best part, though? If it's flashing red in summer, it means the Red Sox game is canceled. For some reason, that just tickles my funny bone inordinately, I don't know why.

And what was the clue at the beginning about? If you're "from around here", you know the Standells song, Dirty Water, about our own Charles River, with the refrain,

I love that dirty water

'Oh oh, Boston, you're my home