Keep Your Eye on the Dot

You’ll keep your eye on the Dot if you’re wise. You’ll keep your eyes peeled and your senses honed sharp, open to opportunities. Plenty strike it rich in Dorchester, Mass. and plenty more get by without complaint or hardship. Yes, Dorchester, the biggest borough in Boston, the place where boys become men and girls become women. This is an adult neighborhood, brawny and beautiful, where neighbors work together to overcome obstacles. This is the thick of the city. It is dense with webs woven in convoluted patterns that overlap the streets’ twists and turns.

Tightly knit in a many-colored fabric of clapboards and accents and values and styles that transcend familial backgrounds, Dorchester is where life gets lived to its fullest potential with more bangs than whimpers. From Upham’s Corner to Fields Corner, from Lower Mills to Andrew Square, from Mattapan to Peabody Square to Neponset Circle to Meetinghouse Hill to Savin Hill; Dorchester’s weft morphs its pattern while keeping true to its underpinning. Stitched together, linked one block to the next, one kitchen per purl, embroidered knots perfectly placed by whim and design, Dorchester is a tapestry best felt with fingertips and seen with one’s own sight rather than described. It is a figure of more than eight and more than eight thousand.

I shared coffee and chocolate with a woman in Adams Village and she walked me to the bus stop to make sure I would get to Columbia Point in one piece. I passed up Dot Avenue past Caritas Christi and check cashing parlors, though Ashmont, through Codman Square then up Mount Bowdoin along Geneva Street. The American flag hung suspended over the shore of Dorchester Bay where Boston fronts its harbor and the wider Atlantic beyond. Everything was still but the wind and the traffic on the streets.

I make my home in Dorchester. I am one of the toughs, made of sinew, muscle and nerve. I am one of the many who make up the whole.

It takes more than a village to raise a grown person to the heights of greatness. It takes a whole, living city. Dorchester is the most robust organ in one of the most vibrant municipal bodies on the face of the globe. Boston births the American spirit. It is the cradle of liberty. It is a beacon that attracts by dint of historical gravitas and by the open-ended promises of its progressive schematic.

In an anatomical atlas of Boston proper, Dorchester occupies the place of spleen and gut and bladders. There is room for waste in Dorchester and there is room for gall, but most of all there is room to work to get things done and make a good life for oneself, one’s family and one’s fellow travelers.

Dorchester is the Dot, the bull’s eye, the sweet spot, the G spot, the soft spot, the tender trap, the hole in the net, the X on the treasure map, the end of many journeys, the ellipsis that ends an unfinished sentence. If you can’t be happy in Dorchester, you can’t be happy in Boston. If you can’t be happy in Boston, you can’t be happy anywhere. You had better aim lower if you can’t keep your eye on the prize.

Mad Dogs and New Londoners

There is no pug more threatening than the ugly mug of a hungry New Londoner. When New Londoners travel to the suburbs, when they eat at the Olive Garden or Appleby’s they don’t like the food. They usually push away the half-finished plates of pabulum. Besides McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and numerous Subway chains, New London is full of entrepreneurs handy with a spatula and a spice rack, No food out of a microwave will ever satsufy as much as fresh ingredients bought that morning and cooked under the broiler with devotion to craft.

New Londoners do things their own way, in ways they polished over the centuries since the city’s founding in 1646, You can tweak perfection, but you cannot really improved on it. New things are new, bur they are not better. If a New Londoner lacks patience, it is because he or she had perpspectve. If a New Londoner slavers, it is because he or she is rabidly hungry for something authentic and not out of a can. Give this beast steak, not dried nuggets out of a bag that make their own gravy when water is added.

Crystal Clear

The air in New London today is as clear as the crystals hung on the world's largest chandelier which happens to hang over the food court in the Waterford Mall. Yes, the Crystal Mall rivals Versialles, the way New London rivals old London.

Whalehead King found a shiny dime today in the Henny Penny parking lot. He held it up in his ungloved hand, risking chillblains, to marvel at its sparkles that caught the New London sun as crisply as the clouds overhead and the whitecaps in the Thames River. The dime made him squint to see it. He had found it tails-up, the New London way, so he knew today would be lucky.

How lucky was today? It is too early to tell, but if it is like another New London Day, it will be full of surprises, good news and constant change. It will be chockablock with timely topics addressed in depth. It will inform, delight, entertain and inspire. A New London Day will encourage effective democracy to action. I am sure this Day will be full of what makes New London, Conn. what it is.

You cannot make a phonecall with a dime, not even at the Dutch Tavern. You can't put a price on New London, Conn. The city has a value hard to measure with coins. Every yardstick aligned next to New London has the wrong marks. The voice of a people is written on paper. It is inscirved on the charter and the newsboy will bring a more current form to your doorstep. New London, Conn. is a place that wears its heart on the inside of its sleeve.