OH HAPPY DAY

OH HAPPY DAY

During the long days of an illness … reading about the world …
I thought mostly: s i g h.

On the second day of April in this year 2010 I was sitting on the “T” going to a doctor’s appointment when my world changed as quickly as if I had been swept (by a worm hole?) into a fantasy.

It was the kind of subway car where you can sit on parallel rows facing each other. Across from me I noticed a woman absorbed in an old black book, which, squinting, I could see was Antigone. She was 40-ish, absorbed, dark hair drawn back, a former ballerina? Next to her a woman, older, her countenance weary, was absorbed in a paperback, Cabin 333. I realized that five of those in this seven-place seat-set were lost in reading: a young woman, perhaps 27, a hardcover copy of God Is Not Great…a slender bookish-appearing man, The Economist. A handsome dark-haired man, perhaps early 30s, had his hands wrapped so securely around his hardcover book I couldn’t read the title. As I was leaving the car I asked him for the title: Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future. Friendly and curious he said “Why do you want to know?” I’m surveying what people read on the T, I said. He gave a big smile.

I paused on an outside bench to ponder: If five out of seven people on a random subway car were reading what I just saw they were indeed reading, then the world is better, it has to be! Maybe the change is coming. My heart had lifted up, reasonable or not. The world seemed hopeful. My persistent hyper-seriousness danced in my mind a semi-hostile tango with my intermittently-appearing happy heart. I swept it all away and walked on with my happy heart.

Coming back I was walking from the far end of the Charles Street Station’s platform when I remembered a scene from years before. Two young teens, black, were standing with their backs to the river; I heard one say “Maybe we can see Charles.” I thought to help: “No, you have to turn around, it’s the river, the Charles River, over there.”

On an instant their faces were startled. One said “It’s our cousin Charles. Sometimes we can see him in the yard.” They had been looking with such great intensity in the correct direction: at the Charles Street Jail. While I, a white busybody stranger, had thought she would “help” them understand what Charles was. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I awkwardly said as I took a step away. Oh! My chagrin arrived like a lightning strike. I was consumed with a grievous awareness.

Life lessons.

Now on today’s day I crossed over for the first time to the hotel developed in 2007 out of the imposing building that had been built in 1851 as a “humane” jail for short-term prisoners. I entered beneath a modernist sign “The Liberty Hotel,” walked past a bar café labeled in jaunty sans serif letters: “Clink.” The concierge told me the jail’s history was illustrated in a small space around the corner of the gigantic atrium.

Among the prisoners in the early decades were murderers awaiting trial and young boys fined $3 and two days in jail for “playing ball in the street.” In 1945 a U-Boat commander, seized in the Azores and imprisoned in Charles Street Jail with his crew, killed himself with glass from his sunglasses.

The exhibition heralded one of the most well known residents: birth control activist William R Baird imprisoned in 1967 for giving out birth control devices at Boston University. State law at the time banned distribution of contraceptives except to married couples with a doctor’s prescription, a case eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.

Standing in the great atrium I registered how confidently architects and designers had transformed the old building into “Can you believe it!” Vast walls of nineteenth century brick, uncovered in their careful beauty, sweep around the atrium like upright meadows. Hugely ornate round windows drew visual focus in a way that must not have been possible before.

And there is a slight eeriness, like the thrill we deny we feel when we see an accident. The past can easily be felt. Some will no doubt sense the prisoners, the bad times.

The concierge had an impeccable and solicitous manner far beyond what we usually see in these helpful professionals. A kind of shield? For him? For us?

I walked away to find and eat unwashed strawberries out of their box. To daydream about the subway readers, the black teenagers, the prisoners, the privileged guests lounging at the bottom of the atrium’s vastness. How fascinating to see the world. I was super alive. I was happy.