Happy birthday, happy birthday
Whoopee doo, whoopee doo
Hope your day is pleasant, open up your present
Just for you, just for you
So, yeah...I'm 30. It doesn't really feel all that different, except I have yet to really physically exert myself and then wake up the next morning to feel like a bulldozer did laps on my body. Thanks to Chris for the early warning.
I'm not really much of a birthday party guy, and my parents were never ones to throw me enormously elaborate parties - I guess that's why we get along so well. I think the biggest shindig they ever threw for me was taking me and a few friends to Fenway when I was like 8 or 9...there are pictures of six of us sitting in a row wearing Red Sox painter hats. I think we were somewhere in the upper grandstands in left field though I don't really remember - I just know that we were sitting in the blue seats, which is appropriate since an 8 or 9 year old is the only size person that can comfortably fit in one of those. It boggles the mind how much an outing like that would cost these days, since our seats usually cost us $25 per ass. Even if I only went with three friends, I think my brothers went as well, which means both my mother and father went...that's eight tickets, plus food (and despite a bag of popcorn being bigger than my head back then, of course nobody SHARES them).
At any rate, when Christmas rolled around last year, I got more or less the usual complement of presents from my parents, but the big one was left for last - a series of small boxes containing rolled-up strips of paper, which I then had to assemble. They spelled out a message announcing a family trip to be taken sometime this summer to Baltimore in honor of my 30th birthday, including lodging, tickets to a Sox game, and other entertainment in and about the general Baltimore area. Unbeknownst to my parents, Mrs. Dave and I had already made plans to go for our anniversary, and we started hatching more grandiose plans, centered around the Red Sox playing the Cubs at Wrigley Field for the first time ever, or the Red Sox playing the White Sox in late July as a fallback plan. Unfortunately, the White Sox series went on sale first...and sold out. Then the Cubs series went on sale...and sold out in about a sixteenth of a nanosecond.
Shit.
Fortunately, that still left my parents several months to plan a similar extravaganza, closer to home (after we got over the initial stage of blinking in shock that our plans had so rapidly been dashed). They asked for a few ideas of things we could do over a weekend in Boston, and my only submission (at first) was a return trip to see Blue Man Group - the missus and I had gone to the show last summer as a late anniversary gift, but had to leave halfway through as her mild malaise gave way to full-blown illness and discomfort. I later thought of a Fenway Park tour, which we had never done despite having lived in the Boston area for seven years now (seven years! Holy crap!), but since my mother does so enjoy planning events like this, I decided it would be more fun for her to not make any more suggestions and just let her enjoy the elaborate construction of a weekend birthday celebration.
A couple of days beforehand we were instructed to be ready by 10am on Saturday, and to be HUNGRY. Upon their arrival (at 9:30, no less) we were informed that Saturday consisted of six phases. Phase 1 was a visit of my old stomping grounds back in Needham - we went back to visit 92 Damon Road (amusing ourselves with the fact that the blinds in the basement appeared to be the same blinds that had been there when my parents bought the place 32 years ago), drove by Hillside Elementary (I was dismayed to see that Splinter City, our old behemoth of a wooden jungle gym, had gone the way of the triceratops, and was surprised to see the place was so SMALL), Pollard Middle School (of which I held very few pleasant memories) and Needham High School (of which I held very few memories, period, having left after a year when we moved to Maine). We drove by my first place of employment, the Needham Free Public Library, which was doubling in size. This was a bit surprising considering budget cuts were so severe that I was actually laid off there...yes, they couldn't afford my $4.63 an hour, 20 hours a week. Ouch.
On to phase 2 - lunch in the North End. We stopped in at Galleria Umberto Rosticceria, which sounds like a super fancy place, but is a real hole in the wall. However, it happens to be a hole in the wall that serves the most amazing Sicilian pizza known to man, for a paltry buck a slice. There are about eight items on the menu - pizza, three calzones, arancini and a couple other things. The owners basically whip up a batch of food, open at 11, and close when they run out, which is usually by around 2pm. The place couldn't be any more sparsely decorated, but people don't go there for the ambiance, they go for the pizza. The four of us bought two calzones and eight pieces of pizza, and there were no survivors. Great stuff.
Phase 2a consisted of walking off the effects of phase 2 rather than proceeding directly to phase 2b. Despite it being well north of 90 degrees and hazy, we walked all the way from the North End to the Common and the Public Gardens, passing by the swan boats and ending up at the building on Marlboro Street where my mother first lived when she moved to Boston. The place now houses a dentist's office. The options from there were to either walk back to the North End for phase 2b and car retrieval, or to take the T back. The T won out in the face of the suffocating heat, and we surfaced back near Hanover Street, quickly ducking into the one and only Maria's Pastry Shop, home of Boston's best cannoli. Mike's may be more famous with its ubiquitous boxes, but you haven't had a cannoli in Boston until you've had a shell filled right before your eyes from a pastry tube that's been chilling in the fridge next to the counter. The ricotta is still frosty and the shell is still crispy (that is, unless you got a chocolate shell, since you can't really tell underneath all that chocolatey goodness) - it was a welcome respite to sit in the well-air-conditioned confine's of Maria's and enjoy the cool sweetness of Boston's best. Phase 2b complete.
After extracting our car from betwixt the curb and a (temporarily) abandoned Coke truck, it was off to give ourselves some culture. And some Red Sox. But where in Boston can you do both at once? The Museum of Fine Arts, it turns out. They have a temporary exhibition right now featuring one of Norman Rockwell's paintings and an assortment of Red Sox memorabilia. We saw Ted Williams' old locker, some old World Series scorecards, programs and ticket stubs (including one from the 1975 World Series...almost as old as me!) and some new World Series stuff (Curt Schilling's ginormous shoe, Johnny Damon's batting glove, a signed baseball). And all of this in just one puny room of the MFA. We walked through most of the rest of the museum, but time was running short because our next appointment was at 4:30. One of the coolest non-Sox exhibits was a room of old musical instruments, some of them incredibly detailed in their carving work and inlays. We also got to see a large collection of original Paul Revere silver work and furniture as well as famous works by Sargent, Winslow Homer and more. Our tickets were good for a return visit within 10 days but life just got busy and we never did get around to it.
Then just as quickly as our visit had begun, it ended, and we were off to our 4:30 appointment, phase 4, and the Prudential Center. There are many things to do at the Prudential Center - some ridiculously expensive shopping and dining, a trip up to the observation deck at the top, or even a spin through the nicest Shaw's Supermarket you'll ever see, but as it turns out, we were there for a Boston Duck Tour. If you're not familiar with the Duck Tour concept, you basically take a tour of Boston and the environs in an amphibious vehicle, rolling through the North End and Charlestown before literally taking the plunge, splashing down into the Charles River and chugging around the water for a total of 80 minutes before getting back to your point of departure. Our ConDUCKtor was none other than the highest-ranking officer in the Duck Fleet - Admiral Amnesia. But just as his bio says, he didn't forget a thing, even managing to not take off a single rear-view mirror while negotiating some narrow streets in Charlestown. He even let a couple of five-year-olds drive...well, while we were in the water, anyway.
Upon returning to the Pru after our tour, the original plan had called for us to go for drinks at the Top Of The Hub as phase 5, but given the fact that it's just about the most üaut;berschwanky restaurant in Boston, and given the fact that we had sweated through our respective garments thanks to the üaut;berhigh temperatures and humidity, a restaurant of such schwankitude was probably the last place we should show up. Though such is their schwank that we might not have even stuck to their seats. So instead we opted to go to Champion's, the sports bar across the street that's part of the Marriott Copley, and the place I first met my friend Chris (before a Blues Traveler show at Northeastern in '96). Oh, and it just happened that the Red Sox were finishing up a game against the Cubs - so we at least got to see some of the series that had originally been the dream destination for the birthday weekend. And yea, joyous was the air conditioning that surrounded us. I drank the Coke I was served in about 2.3 seconds - well, actually, I more absorbed it through my pores in that stretch of time - and we watched a couple innings of an aborted Sox comeback, followed by the Belmont Stakes (horses running in circles is just about as fascinating as cars driving in circles).
Phase 6 was the final phase of the day, and involved an authentic Spanish dinner down on Newbury Street, at Tapeo. Interestingly enough, we'd already been to one place by the same name, in Oregon on our honeymoon. This was more authentically Spanish, looking like a downstairs bodega-type place - walking downstairs into a dimly-lit, heavily-decorated cluster of closely-packed tables. I had some delicious cordero asado (leg of lamb steak) but the best meal of the evening was my mother's pescado a la sal, literally translated as "fish in salt". Was it ever - the thing came encrusted in a half-inch-thick layer of salt that the waiter proceeded to break off the fish, which he then expertly skinned and filleted right in front of us. Quite the presentation, and quite the dinner, especially when accompanied by a tart, dry bottle of Spanish Rioja red wine. And so ended phase 6 and night 1 of the 30th birthday celebration.
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