Loving the Dot Life.

Birds do it. Bees do it. People in Eastie and in West Roxbury do it. People in Dorchester do it too: they fall in love.

A city is a school of hard knocks and Boston is no exception. There is a reason that MIT and Harvard are located across the Charles River in Cambridge. Painful lessons get taught and learned in a metropolis where the spoons are not cast in sterling silver but in zinc and lead, pig iron and trace molybdenum, a curry of slag and mercury tailings mixed into a slurry of ferrous sulfate, ferrous oxate and feral habits. Some intellectual meals are consumed with dainty silverware, while others are served up on the blades of snow shovels and forced down an unwilling student's throat with a boot heel and a blackjack that is more bitter than any supermarket or convenience store brand of licorice.

It takes a neighborhood to raise a child, and anyone who can recognize that fact can be the Secretary of State or, maybe, even President of all 50 United States. There is no rule that someone born and raised in Dorchester, Mass., the biggest and best part of Boston, cannot reach past the limits of her or his potential. Comets never stop. Dorchester hasn't stopped moving or evolving since Time began. There is no evidence to suggest that Dorchester itself doesn't set the standard toward which other places should aim. Some places lead. Eventually, other places will follow the sweet, sweet smell of success. For the moment, at least, Dorchester stands alone.

Dorchester is unique. Spend a few hours on Bowdoin Street or on Columbia Road or on the mid-southerly stretches of Columbia Road. You learn quickly enough that you're not in Roxbury anymore. You learn quickly enough that while you are in Boston, you are in a different kind of Boston. You are in Dorchester. You're in the Dot, and the Dot is not a pot of jam, a pot of mustard, or a cannabis market. It is a place in which generations follow one anther trying to do well for everyone involved, personally, familiarly and communally. Each party pulling ever upward at the sails with all hands on deck.

Children are raised in Dorchester to become responsible adults, productive citizens, vertebrae in Boston's semi-rigid, semi-flexible, ramrod backbone. Adults spend their whole lives in Dorchester, mixing their good will and collected energy, minute-by-passing minute, into the concrete that will cement a better tomorrow. Love makes a community and love blossoms in Dorchester. Sometines that love is passionate. Most often that love is resigned and contented that good work is being done.

Birds do it and bees do it. Dorchesterites do it too. There is plenty of room and time in Dorchester for love. Office workers downtown watch the clock ready to punch out and get on with thier real lives, their Dot lives. They leave Boston proper and head home on the bus or the Fairmont Line or the Red Line. You can love your job in Boston but if you live in Dorchester, that's where you really love your life.

Some different ways to think about the facts of Dorchester.....

...secrets, situations, comedies, decadence....Dorchester...100% on the Dot.