Kivrin

breadandroses and I took a Last Gasp Of Summer trip to Boston over the long weekend. It was, overall, lovely, but a bit odd as always to keep crashing against younger versions of myself.

We went out to Concord on Friday, where we visited the home of Louisa May Alcott and the Old North Bridge where there was the first formal engagement between British and American forces. At the house we had a tour from a friendly but disorganized guide, and at the bridge we listened to a stirring (a word that here means "over the top") account of the skirmish from a talking box and then a more nuanced conversation with a park ranger about the memorialization of the battle and particularly the small monument to the three British soldiers killed there. Being a park ranger would make me crazy, but I do covet the Smoky-the-Bear hats.

On Saturday we made a pilgrimage to the New England Mobile Book Fair - which, I observed as a child, would better be called the New England Immobile Book Fair because it is, literally, a warehouse. Everything is at least 20% off list price there, and the remainders rooms are wonderlands. The management keeps overhead down by simplifying the shelving: all the new books are organized by publisher and within that by title, so everything that comes in can go straight onto the shelf with no sorting. (The markdowns are sorted by genre and within that by author... sometimes.) When I was young there were multiple copies of BOOKS IN PRINT through which you would browse to find the publisher you needed. Now, of course, it's computer terminals, but there's still a luddite feeling to the operation, given that the terminals are running something like Windows 2000. The age of Amazon has definitely dealt the Book Fair a blow; I've never seen the parking lot so empty, even on a weekday, and this was a Saturday afternoon. I bought more than I would have anywhere else (viz. a nice paperback Pippi Longstocking, a new-to-me Emma Donoghue, and a freestanding copy of A Study In Scarlet) just to do a little something for a beloved institution.

On Sunday, after church, we went to another local institution tenaciously holding on into the internet age: the West Newton Cinema. Though it lives in infamy in my memory as the place I once spilled a large root beer across the lobby carpet and had to clean it up with teeny tiny napkins under the gleefully critical eye of an elderly patron who chirped "look what you did!" as I scuttled after ice cubes, it also lives in fond memory as the place I could get hot tea to go along with The Madness of King George. We saw Rob Brydon and Steve Cooper in The Trip, a fictionalized account of a road trip the two comedians took through the north of England. It's a bit humiliation-squicky in places but sidesplitting in others, as when Rob and Steve start doing dueling Michael Caine impressions, or when, in the course of long drives, they start riffing on random things like costume dramas. You'll be able to tell if someone's seen this film by their response to you barking "To bed!" at them.