Beacon Hill, Boston, October 25
A walk with David Bonetti, my Boston native Virgil - guide among the invocations of the Founding Fathers, the 'orangy' brick and brownstone: Federalist, to Georgian, to Victorian, to Bauhaus & Gropius; to the afternoon sun and chilly wind to gold dome, white Cross & steeple, to Anglican Loyalist Tory King's Chapel family pew; to worn stone stairway, rippled red brick street and alley. To the Commons to the astonishing bronze three deep relief of black Civil War soldiers marching off to war and death. To early Public Halls to argue the formation of a future; the first black school, to the declarations of Frederick Douglas & his auxiliary love and use of his photograph. The mention of Robert Lowell growing up on the lower edge of the hill among the less than white Irish and Italians.
We walk and walk across the bones of the founding City, one script over another, the consciousness comes alive with an old historical intimacy; David, the native once school boy, quotes Longfellow with well remembered accuracy of those men with long rifles at the ready at the base of the "rude bridge".
That once declaration and protection of an independence; that perpetual vigilance in this country, wait now and forever for those who continually create it or those who would take it away.