04/05/2017
Charles Circle - Charles St at Cambridge St (12:52 pm)
Copley Square - Dartmouth St at Boylston St (1:01 pm)
Hubway is BACK in Beacon Hill! It seems like there should be more pomp and circumstance. I guess I celebrate wildly by riding instead of walking to the library, a decision saving me about fifteen minutes of travel time.
My enthusiasm for Hubway's return, though real, is not at last year's level. I've simply taken more of a liking to slow walks through the area. Whether this is directly related to my no longer wearing headphones is unclear (though I would bet on it, if forced to pinpoint one reason). But having the bike rack next door once more will make commuting out of the city to Cambridge, Somerville, or even Brookline a lot easier than it was throughout the winter.
04/10/2017
Conway Park - Somerville Avenue (2:31 pm)
Linear Park - Mass. Ave. at Cameron Ave. (2:48 pm)
I celebrate a nice early spring day by going out for lengthy ride through Arlington. My first stop is about halfway up, at Conway Park in Somerville. As I head out again to resume the trip, an older woman starts waving at me from a bench next to the bikes. I roll slowly over.
At first, I cannot understand a word she says. Her problem slowly becomes clear. She's looking for something near both Route 2 and a Stop and Shop. I don't have a good sense of where this semi-mythical place might be. I ask her address and she shows me on her smartphone. It is written entirely in a different language, most likely Chinese, though I suppose it could be any Asian language I can't read (which is all of them).
We go back and forth a little while longer. Eventually, I find a better map using her phone and try to point her in the right direction. Still, when I leave, I'm unsure if she is going to find her way. She is over an hour from her destination, it isn't clear she will be able to ask anyone else for help, and there are no signs on the way - in any language - that might help point her way.
This reminds me of a morning commute from a day long ago. I was boarding an inbound train at Central Square when an older woman got my attention. I did not decipher a word she said except 'Chinatown'. I tried to ask her if she was going there and it seemed like she agreed. She asked me where I was from by pointing at me and rattling off words I thought were names of cities. I said Tokyo and drew a rough sketch of the Japanese flag on the inside cover of my book. She seemed to both understand and like my communication style.
We got to Downtown Crossing and I walked with her to the Orange Line platform. Again, the same stray thought passed through my mind - was this enough? I asked another waiting passenger who was around my age if she could help out and make sure this woman got off at the Chinatown stop. When I left the two of them on the platform, I felt a little uneasy. I guess all training wheels come off at some point but the process of removing them from the bike is never easy.
I'm again reminded of what I used to think about while riding Hubway back and forth to the food bank. At some point, I realized while volunteering that everyone must decide what is no longer 'my problem'. It is an interesting turn of the expression because 'not my problem' is usually expressed dismissively with perhaps a hint of disgust. But that's not quite the tone I'm looking for here. What I mean is more that if everyone stopped to resolve every problem they saw, nobody would ever have the time required to figure out what the most important problem they could solve actually is.
I suppose the real challenge here is to learn how to use 'not my problem' as a way to free up time and energy for when I have decided something else is my problem. I suspect this is the real reason why I stopped volunteering at a food bank and started volunteering at a hospice. But I'm still not entirely sure - at this point, it isn't perfectly clear what is or isn't my problem. Sometimes, I worry this lack of clarity is its own problem.
