11-16-11
I took a quick trip back from San Francisco to Boston last Thursday. The impetus was to see my youngest son play the role of John Wilkes Booth in Sondheim’s dark yet oddly appealing musical the Assassins. Thad is a senior in a well-respected University in Worcester, MA. (He did a damned fine job, I must admit.) The trip also gave me the opportunity to spend a couple of days with my other two sons: Jon, who lives outside of Worcester, and Chris, who lives in Greater Boston.
My girlfriend and I spent Monday in Boston with my oldest son (and his girlfriend) doing a quick tour of that wonderful city. There was no way I was going to spend a day in Boston without seeing the Bell. We parked in Somerville and took the T (the subway) to the Museum exit on Huntington Ave. It was during the T ride that I checked my camera. Guess what? The battery was dead. 3,500 hundred miles to go see a bell and my camera was dead! Fortunately for me, Roxanne’s camera although low on battery power, had enough left in the tank to take several pictures. Now, I just have to figure out how to get them from her camera onto this website . . .
Walking behind the Museum of Fine Arts, we spotted the footbridge that leads to the War Memorial in the Emerald Necklace Park (in the Fenway.) As soon as you step onto the bridge, the first thing you see on the other side is the Japanese Temple Bell. It is magnificent!
Just before I left for the East, I got an email from one of our devoted readers. She is now also interested in the bell. Laurie was musing that part of her thinks the bell should be back in Japan, but part of her thinks it should be here. Then she asked me what I thought. I decided that despite the fact I had an opinion about that, I’d like to see the bell firsthand before I answered. I am now ready to answer that question.
I need at least another day for the jetlag to dissipate, and some unspecified amount of time to get the photos onto my computer. Then I will submit another blog entry on the Bell.
steve
ps. Here’s a little anecdote about the bell. While we were having dinner in a burger joint in the north part of Worcester on Friday afternoon, I got a phone call from Pat Fedele. (If you been reading this blog for a while, you’ve heard his name mentioned before.) Pat tells me that his division was in charge of guarding the bell while it was being transported from Japan to San Francisco. The not-quite-old-enough-to-vote seasoned sailor, in charge of the division, carved his name into the top of the bell en-route somewhere on the Pacific. Before stopping for the last time in San Francisco, a senior officer saw the defacement and told Pat that if he didn’t get his name off the bell, he would be courtmartialled. Pat did. We looked closely at the top of the bell. Looks like he buffed it out enough to avoid that dastardly penalty.