And it's best foot first and the road a-sliding past

I do not know that I had any particular plans for this day after Thanksgiving, except that I refuse on principle to queue like a lemming for stuff I wouldn't buy any other day of the year. As it turned out, I was never in any danger: I met schreibergasse's train at North Station and we spent the next two hours walking. Over the Zakim Bridge, past weather-blackened frontages of brick and the remains of green copper high on some warehouse on Beverly Street. Over the locks of the Charles River Dam, which we did not realize we were crossing. (We wondered about the colored bars installed on the handrails of the pier: passerby-playable chimes, the internet tells me. We inspected them intently, but didn't think to thump them. I bet a six-year-old would have figured it out.) Underneath North Washington Street and onto a harbor-walk bit of wharf where we could just glimpse the masts of Old Ironsides over the roofs on one side and a tauntingly photogenic sunset through the cable-stays of the Zakim Bridge on the other, all red clouds and sailor's delight. (I took some unsatisfactory pictures on my phone, which is so far from a camera it's laughable. They're at the end of this post anyway, because I never do have pictures.) I should mention we had embarked on this route because I was fairly certain I knew how to find the other end of the footbridge derspatchel and I had seen under construction in March; I had dragged Schreiber out to the end of the Amtrak platform at North Station to make sure. It came curling up out of what turned out to be Paul Revere Park. We crossed it over the commuter rail tracks with their dun-colored drawbridge, the low brick building with half-boarded windows that is the old Signal Tower 'A' of the Boston and Maine Railroad and the dune-piles of the Boston Sand and Gravel Company, which Schreiber recognized before I did. And when we found ourselves at the willows and canals of the North Point Park, it seemed entirely silly to get back on the Green Line to change for the Red Line to meet teenybuffalo at Café Vanille on Charles Street, so we merely took a right turn from the Science Park station and walked up the darkening highways past Mass General (I pointed out the ramp at 275 Charles Street where we used to pick my father up after work, before the Red Line built the extension out to Alewife and we waited for him at the caterpillar benches) and the Liberty Hotel and we still changed at Charles/MGH, but only in the sense that we carefully did not take the obvious left onto Cambridge Street and go to my dentist's instead. We did sit down for about fifteen minutes at the coffeeshop with Teeny. Then we all took the Red Line to Harvard and walked to Follow the Honey, because Schreiber had never been there. (Everyone should have the experience of being offered a dozen different kinds of honey from as many different places, ideally made from flowering plants you never thought about eating. Like pine trees from the island of Evia, which I realized halfway down Mass. Ave. I know way the hell better when it's spelled Εὔβοια.) And then I walked into Davis Square to drop off a small jar of Greek pine honey at Rob's, because obviously I had gotten no exercise that day. I came home and ate a severe quantity of leftovers, because that is what happens the day after Thanksgiving when your idea of breakfast was some yogurt around noon and then you hike all over Boston with someone who walks as fast as you do.

( An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last. )

It should be obvious from context this was all a good thing.