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rushthatspeaks and I do for our anniversaries: have dinner somewhere interesting and drive around the coastal towns of New England. Last year it was Sarma and Nahant. The year before, Julian's and Bourne. To celebrate our fifth year together, we ate at Istanbul'lu in Teele Square and got lost in Marblehead.
For dinner, we shared small plates of ispanak borani, sigara börek, mercimek köfte—spinach with thick yogurt and tomato sauce, cylindrical phyllo rolls filled with feta, ground red lentils shaped with spices I couldn't entirely identify—and then the Sultan's Delight, which is a well-deserved but unhelpfully vague name for the silkiest preparation of eggplant I know, topped with tender lamb and roasted tomatoes. (If I'm lucky, it was a variant on this recipe, meaning we could make it at home. The inclusion of the roux accords with the velvety texture of the eggplant. Someday we will just take B. to Istanbul'lu and he will converse in Turkish with the waiters and we'll be sure.) Dessert was keskul and künefe, the former being the almond pudding that Rush had unsuccessfully tried ordering on three prior occasions. The restaurant offers sour cherry and apricot juices to drink, so we did. Everything was delicious.
And then we got lost almost immediately on setting out for the North Shore, ending up parked a block from the Stoneham Theatre—the marquee advertised Funny Forum, which is a reasonable abbreviation for that show—while we wrestled with an unhelpful map of Boston and an uncooperative map of the Eastern Seaboard which took me something over five minutes of physical comedy to fold back up correctly. We were aiming for Salem by way of Route 128, but somehow we managed to drive right through the city and overshoot into Marblehead. I started laughing when we passed Bunghole Liquors; it was one of the mythical destinations of my college friend group, along with a now-defunct Irish pub in Natick whose real name nobody used after the first time it was referred to as Dingus O'Flanaghan's. Marblehead itself turned into a wilderness of residential streets inhabited by dense trees and suburban houses; we'd driven past Salem State University and over a bridge with water to either side, so we knew there must be sea close by, but we didn't seem able to find it. I saw one house with a door knocker in the shape of a brass lobster. The occupants of another gave me a Lovecraftian moment: I suspect they were watching a monster movie on their flatscreen TV, of which we had seen several glowing like bioluminescence through the living room windows of otherwise darkened homes, but all I saw was a fish-sleek, reptilian head blinking between the curtains as we passed. In retrospect and with access to a decent map, we should have turned onto Ocean Avenue the first or third time we passed it—we'd have found the sea easily enough on Marblehead Neck. Instead we drove at cross angles through the peninsula until we finally tried Commercial Street and found the Dolphin Yacht Club, with its glimpse of boats bobbing on the night-reflecting water and nowhere legal to park. Tracking the shoreline through a sequence of small, beautifully historic streets obviously never designed for automotive traffic, we came to the Boston Yacht Club and then Crocker Park, where we inadvertently flashed our headlights on a pair of necking teens and stashed the car next to a turreted stone building that looked for all the world like a ruined grange, although Rush later discerned that there were lights on beyond the ivy and the trees; someone was home. We had no flashlights. We avoided the necking teens. We weren't sure how far down to the harbor the concrete path from the top of Crocker Park would let us, slanting between the rain-damp, lichen-slick ledges; it squared off into stairs and led us directly to a gangway and a floating dock with a sign that said nothing about trespassing. We could see the water folding whitely in between the granite spars of the shore, a thicket of boats on the harbor. There was open sea if we looked to our left, a charcoal-colored sky from horizon to horizon. The wind came in soft and salty. We stood on the rain-wet wood and felt the sea shifting under our feet. Presently it began to rain again and we climbed back to the park and the car as Rush described different cruise lines to me. The bronze statue of a seal shone wet as short fur in the thickening rain. Rush only said "Dawn breaks over Marblehead" once, which I think showed admirable restraint on their part.
And then it took at least another half-hour to get out of Marblehead, because of all the non-Euclidean cities of New England, this is the one that decided to add "labyrinth" to its design specs. Perhaps I should compare it to a fish trap. There were decorative cod everywhere on the waterfront houses, many of them historical buildings, eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century. We agreed that the streets should have stayed cobblestone, instead of trying to fit cars into a maze of commercial lanes. But we got out at last, and we followed Route 129 until it turned into the unmarked rotary of last year's Nahant adventure and then the Lynnway with its familiar landmarks of the Green Tea Chinese Restaurant and Honey Dew Donuts and presently Revere Beach and the Wonderland T stop with its electric blue lights. I'm not certain on the details of the toll road and the near-miss with Logan Airport, but I remember distinctly that we were in the Sumner Tunnel when we started talking about Jonathan Richman and the inexplicable failure of Massachusetts to name "Roadrunner" its state song. Rush dropped me off at home and the cats ran to greet me at the door.
It is raining, and cool out, and three in the morning: it's not the tenth of September anymore, but I haven't gone to bed yet. So happy anniversary, my best cousin, my sea-finding love. To many more years of driving by night.
Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, "Roadrunner (Thrice)"
On Route 128 when it's late at night
When we're headed from the North Shore to the South Shore
Well, I see Route 3 in my sight
And I'm a roadrunner
rushthatspeaks and I do for our anniversaries: have dinner somewhere interesting and drive around the coastal towns of New England. Last year it was Sarma and Nahant. The year before, Julian's and Bourne. To celebrate our fifth year together, we ate at Istanbul'lu in Teele Square and got lost in Marblehead.For dinner, we shared small plates of ispanak borani, sigara börek, mercimek köfte—spinach with thick yogurt and tomato sauce, cylindrical phyllo rolls filled with feta, ground red lentils shaped with spices I couldn't entirely identify—and then the Sultan's Delight, which is a well-deserved but unhelpfully vague name for the silkiest preparation of eggplant I know, topped with tender lamb and roasted tomatoes. (If I'm lucky, it was a variant on this recipe, meaning we could make it at home. The inclusion of the roux accords with the velvety texture of the eggplant. Someday we will just take B. to Istanbul'lu and he will converse in Turkish with the waiters and we'll be sure.) Dessert was keskul and künefe, the former being the almond pudding that Rush had unsuccessfully tried ordering on three prior occasions. The restaurant offers sour cherry and apricot juices to drink, so we did. Everything was delicious.
And then we got lost almost immediately on setting out for the North Shore, ending up parked a block from the Stoneham Theatre—the marquee advertised Funny Forum, which is a reasonable abbreviation for that show—while we wrestled with an unhelpful map of Boston and an uncooperative map of the Eastern Seaboard which took me something over five minutes of physical comedy to fold back up correctly. We were aiming for Salem by way of Route 128, but somehow we managed to drive right through the city and overshoot into Marblehead. I started laughing when we passed Bunghole Liquors; it was one of the mythical destinations of my college friend group, along with a now-defunct Irish pub in Natick whose real name nobody used after the first time it was referred to as Dingus O'Flanaghan's. Marblehead itself turned into a wilderness of residential streets inhabited by dense trees and suburban houses; we'd driven past Salem State University and over a bridge with water to either side, so we knew there must be sea close by, but we didn't seem able to find it. I saw one house with a door knocker in the shape of a brass lobster. The occupants of another gave me a Lovecraftian moment: I suspect they were watching a monster movie on their flatscreen TV, of which we had seen several glowing like bioluminescence through the living room windows of otherwise darkened homes, but all I saw was a fish-sleek, reptilian head blinking between the curtains as we passed. In retrospect and with access to a decent map, we should have turned onto Ocean Avenue the first or third time we passed it—we'd have found the sea easily enough on Marblehead Neck. Instead we drove at cross angles through the peninsula until we finally tried Commercial Street and found the Dolphin Yacht Club, with its glimpse of boats bobbing on the night-reflecting water and nowhere legal to park. Tracking the shoreline through a sequence of small, beautifully historic streets obviously never designed for automotive traffic, we came to the Boston Yacht Club and then Crocker Park, where we inadvertently flashed our headlights on a pair of necking teens and stashed the car next to a turreted stone building that looked for all the world like a ruined grange, although Rush later discerned that there were lights on beyond the ivy and the trees; someone was home. We had no flashlights. We avoided the necking teens. We weren't sure how far down to the harbor the concrete path from the top of Crocker Park would let us, slanting between the rain-damp, lichen-slick ledges; it squared off into stairs and led us directly to a gangway and a floating dock with a sign that said nothing about trespassing. We could see the water folding whitely in between the granite spars of the shore, a thicket of boats on the harbor. There was open sea if we looked to our left, a charcoal-colored sky from horizon to horizon. The wind came in soft and salty. We stood on the rain-wet wood and felt the sea shifting under our feet. Presently it began to rain again and we climbed back to the park and the car as Rush described different cruise lines to me. The bronze statue of a seal shone wet as short fur in the thickening rain. Rush only said "Dawn breaks over Marblehead" once, which I think showed admirable restraint on their part.
And then it took at least another half-hour to get out of Marblehead, because of all the non-Euclidean cities of New England, this is the one that decided to add "labyrinth" to its design specs. Perhaps I should compare it to a fish trap. There were decorative cod everywhere on the waterfront houses, many of them historical buildings, eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century. We agreed that the streets should have stayed cobblestone, instead of trying to fit cars into a maze of commercial lanes. But we got out at last, and we followed Route 129 until it turned into the unmarked rotary of last year's Nahant adventure and then the Lynnway with its familiar landmarks of the Green Tea Chinese Restaurant and Honey Dew Donuts and presently Revere Beach and the Wonderland T stop with its electric blue lights. I'm not certain on the details of the toll road and the near-miss with Logan Airport, but I remember distinctly that we were in the Sumner Tunnel when we started talking about Jonathan Richman and the inexplicable failure of Massachusetts to name "Roadrunner" its state song. Rush dropped me off at home and the cats ran to greet me at the door.
It is raining, and cool out, and three in the morning: it's not the tenth of September anymore, but I haven't gone to bed yet. So happy anniversary, my best cousin, my sea-finding love. To many more years of driving by night.
Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, "Roadrunner (Thrice)"
On Route 128 when it's late at night
When we're headed from the North Shore to the South Shore
Well, I see Route 3 in my sight
And I'm a roadrunner
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