Spanish views from a small town

A few days ago, I saw on a Facebook page about Boston, that they were asking where readers would go if they had twenty-four hours in Boston. Is it possible to choose? I would go to my old haunts in Jamaica Plain. The triple decker where we used to live. I've seen pictures of it on Google Earth, and the cherry tree is gone. They've re-done the front porches, and the bushes and roses are gone. It looks tattered now. Or it did, when Google sent its car around.  There are trees lining the street, now, to protect some of the houses from the afternoon glare. I would go down the street to the old Seaver School, where I attended kindergarten. It's long been converted to condominiums. I still remember the class I was in, with books lining one wall, desks and small chairs, an emergency exit door with glass panes, where the play kitchen was set up. I envied the play kitchen, but a group of friends had a monopoly on it, and would only sometimes let me, the outsider, play, if I asked ni...

When I was sixteen, I started working after school practically across the street from my high school, at Harvard Medical School. I was a type of office and research lab help in the Department of Physiology. I ran errands, washed glassware, and typed information into computer programs. Eventually, I drifted to the department's main office, where I entered invoices into Harvard's computer system, and did all types of office grunt work.  There were two secretaries in the office, Robin and Margaret. Both were nice, though perhaps Robin, more so. The department administrator, to whom we all responded, had her office right next to the main office, and her name was Denise Zakher. From the first, we hit it off. Margaret, the less imaginative secretary, couldn't understand how I could joke so freely with Denise. The administrator was a serious person, who did her job meticulously and got what she expected from people. At times, she could be intimidating. But I noticed a glint in her...

We love to hate them. They drive us nuts. As the story reaches a point at which your nerves are at the breaking point, bam! You have to wait. How long depends on what channel you're watching. Six minutes is the usual, though some channels have maddening commercial breaks of close to fifteen minutes. Everyone hates commercials.  But then there are commercials that we expect, that we await during part of the year. Christmas commercials are some of them. There are commercials for Freixenet cava whose television presentation used to be advertised ahead of time as if it were a new television show. Some of the longest of them took around ten minutes and showcased famous actors and actresses. For the last two years or so, they only last a little longer than a minute and tend to feature Spanish athletic women's teams that are Olympic medalists. But now the full commercial doesn't even appear on television. They have a fifteen minute compressed blurb and that's it. To see i...