My Mattapan, Part II

(continued from yesterday's adventure)

I awaken from a deep sleep, not in a cold sweat as much as with a warmth radiating from my innards. The taste of hot dog grease and a buttered, grilled bun lingers in my mouth. I am not lethargic. I am alive. I am ALIVE.

My companion rouses herself and props herself on an elbow to look me in my crusted eye. "You slept like the devil," she says. "You tossed and turned all night and you talked in your sleep." What did I say? "The same thing over and over. You just kept muttering, 'Mattapan.'"

Mattapan: that part of Boston where reality takes on a different tinge. Mattapan... I am not asleep but I am dreaming, dreaming of hours ticked off in Mattapan. In Mattapan time, time and space converge in a vortex around Mattapan Square, wheels within whorls. Events unfold like stop motion films superimposed over one another. It a Coney Island of the mind. Albert Einstein never stood on the banks of the Neponset River but Linus Pauling did. So did Billy Sunday and Jack Kerouac, of all people. Worlds collide in Mattapan, entropy is rational and all of Heaven and Hell and the lands between are set pieces for unbridled joy. A person can write his or her own opera in Mattapan. Mattapan...

Did I say anything else in my sleep? My companion says no, "All you said was Mattapan over and over all night through. You were making me crazy." That makes sense, Mattapan is the sum of all worlds, it is a state of mind, a state of being, a most perfect place where dreams come true. I was in Mattapan last night.

If Boston were a woman, what part of her anatomy might Mattapan be? I bask in the afterglow of last night and I think I know. Mattapan, if you were a woman I would marry you.