Journey to the East -- May-June 2006 travels to Massachusetts - Part 1

JOURNEY TO THE EAST – Part 1 Arrival

In early April we firmly decided to visit our son, Rahmat, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and confirmed the trip by purchasing two round trip airfares from Hilo to Boston with our credit card. We would arrive on May 23^rd and return on June 6^th. We’d have to struggle to pay off the credit card before interest charges kicked in, and we’d arrive in Boston completely broke.  This is where faith comes in, we told ourselves, risking financial ruin.

As we were planning, Rahmat was completing his master thesis in mechanical engineering at MIT, and hopefully would turn it in and be ready for a short break before diving headlong in the HST (Health Science Technology) program co-sponsored by MIT and Harvard. He was one of a small number of whiz kids accepted into the program.  We later heard that the HST actually stands for Having Students Terminated, because very few make it through the rigors they will have to endure for at least five years.  Anyway, we expected to find Rahmat relieved and ready for a break, though it was more like he was in the briefly calm eye of a horrendous hurricane.

With my first visit to Boston/Cambridge looming in my immediate future, I thought I should begin preparing for the experience by learning a few words of the language common to the Chowder Heads (a term I learned that meant people who live in Boston).  I heard that people in Massachusetts speak their own dialect of English, and I did not want to appear like an ignorant foreigner, I committed myself to be up on the proper way to speak while there.  I found a web site that might help me out: http://www.slanguage.com/boston.html

Here follows some of the words I decided to practice saying correctly:

·         Hominy: Simultaneous combination of notes in a chord (era, harmony)

·         Griller: Local pronunciation for a large primate

·         era: A period of time OR What we say in the beginning, middle and end of every sentence.  Era, boy Gawd, the era, Kennedy’s there, era, wicked pissa, era pack yer cah...

·         Pete Sir: Most say pizza

·         Cotton: You buy milk in it (carton)

·         The T: Boston subway

·         SCENE Ya: Last year of school

·         Ah: Letter between q and s

·         Lodge: Opposite of small (large)

·         BaBa: He cuts your hair

·         Khakis: Start your car with them

·         Tea Potty: Precursor to American Revolution

·         Foddy DOLL Us: $39.99 plus one cent

·         How Ah Ya?: Boston Greeting

·         HAVE Id: Our famous University

·         Pots: Pieces to your kids toys

·         Boy Gawd: By God

I also wanted to read something about the area and picked up a travel book by a British radio reporter named Cash Peters, which had a couple of chapters about the Boston area.  The book’s name, Gullible’s Travels: The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist, should have been warning enough that its contents were not meant to be taken literally, but when it comes to buying what looks like an interesting book I guess I’m just gullible. 

Mr. Peters apparently didn’t encounter the best of times in Boston. Not everything was bad about Boston: it boasted of “exquisite architecture, historic monuments, stretches of open parkland, clean air, variable seasons and wonderful restaurants,” all things that he liked.  However, despite all those enticements, there was one thing that made Boston distasteful and repulsive to Mr. Peters: the people!   Without the people, Boston might be a very “visitable” place, and he concluded, based on his uncooperative interaction with Bostonians, that unlike Minneapolis’s catchy slogan, “The Coolest Place on Earth,” Boston’s slogan must be, “How DARE You Come Here!” 

Based on the judgment of a respectable BBC radio reporter, perhaps I would not have dared to visit Boston if we didn’t have a son in nearby MIT who only had positive things to say about the area, except when it came to the frequent winter storms. But, we were going to visit in late May, so need not worry about freezing winters storms.

After making all the necessary preparations for the trip, the only thing left to do was to pass the time in Hilo until flight day.  To make everything easier, we reserved seats on the new ATA flight direct from Hilo to Oakland, connecting there on United to LA and then on to Boston—a measly 17 hour trip. On the chosen day, May 23^rd, our daughter, Bienshirni, drove us, ladened with luggage (including gifts of chocolate, T-Shirts and other Hawaiian trinkets along with a friend’s suitcase that we would leave for her in Rahmat’s care.), to the Hilo International Airport.  We unloaded at 6:30 a.m. for our 8:00 a.m. ATA flight only to find out that the flight was delayed until 10:50 a.m.  Not wishing to bother Bienshirni to pick us up and bring us back later, Linda and I spent the first four hours sitting in our local airport.  Once on board and on our way, the flight was pleasant and in Oakland we found a great burrito restaurant right next to the United gate of our LA flight.  Apparently, no direct flights to Boston originate from Oakland, requiring us to go farther south to Los Angeles before crossing the USA in the middle of the night.

On the LA to Boston flight we sat next to someone from the Boston area, who kindly shared insights about places to visit if time permitted.  Already, our “Boston experience” started pleasantly, even as I continued to read Cash Peter’s visitor-unfriendly account during part of the flight.  I don’t remember much of what our neighbor passenger said about Boston, but she did emphatically declare that the best lobster dinners were in Maine.

The only negative part of the trip came from being wedged into the economy class seats, which activated my RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome – yes, it really exists and if you don’t believe me, try “Googling” on the Internet for sites explaining how uncomfortable one feels with RLS). Bordering on claustrophobia, the last few hours of the flight took days, or so it seemed.  I even hypothesized that our jet cruised at such a high speed that time slowed down to a trickle, making a regular hour more like two hours. Maybe someone at MIT would be able to validate my hypothesis, I imagined in my idle pain.

Oh, there was another negative aspect of the flight – having flight attendents help transport me in their narrow aisle wheelchair to the tiny rest room so I could relieve my bladder.  I put a curse on the engineers who design inaccessibility into commercial aircraft and on any others responsible for ignoring the needs of those of us with mobility impairments.  If I could walk, why, I’d kick some of them right in the…..nevermind.

Ordeals, thank goodness, eventually end, either by something more agreeable happening or by death.  My discomfort ended upon arrival in Boston with the agreeable presence of Rahmat picking us up and whisking us off to his Massachusetts Avenue Apartment near Harvard (HAVE id) Square. 

Rahmat had successfully completed his thesis and the oral exam that went with it, if only by a nerve cell or two (the thesis focused on tissue regeneration in the nervous system of rats, which is the only thing I understood about his research when he tried to explain it in a simple way.  “Simple” to MIT students means “it’s more complicated than anything you’ve ever had to understand,” and definitely over ordinary peoples’ heads.).

He could now have a brief respite, even though the research never really ended, but had entered a new phase.  After becoming acquainted with Rahmat’s roommate, Ravi, and with our lodgings in the office of his apartment, we spent the first evening strolling to Harvard Square to have dinner at a Malaysian restaurant.  On the street and in the restaurant, the atmosphere felt relaxed and friendly. Around us people of every race who I assumed to be college students mingled naturally in pairs or small groups, chatting and laughing. I listened closely to the accents of those around us, but heard nothing that sounded Bostonian; no “HAVE-ids”; no “ers” between every word; not even one “How Ah ya?”  I heard French accents, Spanish accents, various Asian accents and even an accent or two that reminded me of the Western United States, but no “r”-less Bostonian slang. 

Well, this is Cambridge with many students from abroad, I told myself. And finals are over and the weather’s warm, so these students have reason to be happy and outgoing, instead of being cold and aloof. Wait until we’re in the real Boston among the lifelong residents and working-class people. Then we’ll hear first hand the native dialect, and maybe find out if we should not have dared to come here. 

Oh, and by the way, the Malaysian food tasted good. 

End part one