Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hunting for spring

About this time of year, everyone gets antsy. When will winter really end?

A few warm days help make everyone feel better. But it is when the magnolias bloom along Back Bay’s streets and when the beds in the Boston Public Garden fill with blooms that it really seems like spring. The Greenway has also gotten into the act of presenting us with gardens.

While those blossoms are the most dramatic, pockets of the city have been filling in nicely with their own displays. You might have to look a little further to see them.

A dramatic change occurred after the Boston Marathon bombing when Charlestown resident Diane Valle started the Marathon Daffodils movement. Hundreds of people planted thousands of daffodil bulbs along the marathon route as well as throughout the city. Volunteers also distribute pots of daffodils on this Friday, just before the marathon, and this year it is also Good Friday. It’s nice to have those daffodils to celebrate Easter as well as the Marathon. Look for daffodil pots around Boylston and Newbury streets as well as Charles Street. Look also at the north end of the Greenway for the 13,000 daffodils North End volunteers planted there.

Another dense daffodil display is at the Paul Revere Park between the Washington Street Bridge and the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge on the Charlestown side of the Charles River. As long as you are in Charlestown, you might as well go over to the Gardens for Charlestown at the intersection of Main and Bunker Hill streets. This hillside garden is now mature, always well kept, and a true community endeavor.

The Old North Church’s garden is undergoing archeological investigations in preparation for a new design in conjunction with renovation and restoration of Old North’s building and grounds. But another church has a garden offering that might surprise you and make a good visit.

Old West Church on Cambridge Street has been planting edibles in their mostly sunny front yard. Church members planted apple and cherry trees a couple of years ago and then a mulberry tree and a kiwi vine. Later they arranged a spiral of potted herbs on the front steps, said Old West’s pastor, Sara Garrard. Raised beds on the right of the walkway leading to the church’s front door are built at different levels so children, adults and those in wheel chairs, or those who just want to sit in a chair while they garden, can all take part.

On the left side of the main walkway is a raised bed built under a principle called hugelkultur, in which a trench filled with wooden branches, leaves, mulch, soil, compost and even cardboard, forms the basis for a productive and healthy garden.

Sara said such a structure helps in an urban plot whose surroundings might be contaminated with lead. Last summer that bed produced four different kinds of peppers, lavender, cilantro and other herbs.

Her congregation has been helped by the Boston Food Forest Coalition, which helps communities create “edible public parks” and also by more than 300 Northeastern students who for two years have helped cultivate, plant, weed and harvest.

Sara and her team will begin working in those gardens about the same time as the Boston Marathon if the weather holds. She said neighbors have come to help, and everyone is welcome to help and share in the bounty.

The front yard of the church is open to the public and there have been thefts of whole plants. But Sara has that belief in the goodness of people to help with the task, take what they need and leave plenty for others.

In its third summer, the garden’s purpose is not just to grow food, but also to build relationships and community.

Mass General, just down the street from Old West Church, is another gardening oasis. Its lawn, between the Ether Dome, the Wang addition and its buildings along Blossom Street, is one of the few extensive grassy areas in that part of town. Between the Yawkey building and the Liberty Hotel, MGH maintains a beautiful round garden of mostly perennials.

Such pockets of horticulture decorate our city for seven months of the year. But in the spring we appreciate them the most.

Baffling

So many things I don’t understand. Maybe you don’t either.

Some people in some states are all in a lather about women sharing bathrooms with transgender persons who are now female. My question: how would you know?

This person presumably looks like a woman. She would go into a stall like any other woman. It’s private. She would come out and wash her hands. She might even have make-up on. Seems like a woman to me.

I guess some people are afraid that a man will walk in dressed as a woman and try to molest the women in there. Anything is possible, of course.

But women hardly have to go into a bathroom to find men ready to molest them. We found that out this fall that even certain presidents have problems with predation. A ladies room filled with women who once were men seems a lot safer than hanging around with certain elected officials.

Luckily, we live in Massachusetts. No one seems to be much upset over transgender matters.

What does strike closer to home is the stupidity around the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Didn’t the guys who run that parade realize that the city’s patience with discrimination against any group has run out? They did not win this one, and they won’t in the future. No mayor or governor will celebrate with them unless everyone is included, no matter what their sexual orientation is. Sponsors and spectators will flee. Did they think that Trump’s election gave them a pass? Boston’s reputation as an inclusive city has triumphed over the old prejudices and practices. Get with the program, fellas.

Another puzzling matter is the creature who characterizes himself or herself as an “originalist.” “Originalists” are the Supreme Court justices (and others) who claim they interpret the constitution as James Madison, etc. intended it to be interpreted. Antonin Scalia prided himself on this stance. Apparently so does Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court. They say they base their view on an intellectual study of the law and writings contemporary to the document itself. But even Madison changed his views over the years, so it’s hard to pin him down perfectly.

Makes me wonder. Do “originalists” channel the founding fathers’ inner thoughts? Do they meditate, hoping to divine exactly what Madison was thinking?

Surely they realize that the founders got it wrong many times. Slavery? Not allowing women to vote? Creating an electoral college to get the slave states to join the new United States so that slavery continues to dog us? Three electors in Wyoming represent an average of 187,923 residents each. California’s 55 electors represent an average of 677,355 people each—a disparity of 3.6 to 1. In Massachusetts, each of the 11 electoral votes represents 595,239 people, so a Wyoming voter has about three times as much influence on electing a president that we do. That doesn’t sound like one “man,” one vote.

The founders got it wrong with so many matters, why would we consider their views (whatever those were) as sacred in other realms. Laws have been passed, and circumstances have changed. What makes some supposedly smart people believe they are one of the few who have such insight into the heads of men who lived more than 200 years ago and that those opinions should be considered ahead of everything else? It seems weirdly like those folks who know what God wants. Another direct line that you figure most people don’t have. Odd.

And there are still those mattresses. I was baffled by mattresses last fall, and I’m still baffled by them. We recently visited relatives in Scottsdale, Arizona. There was a mattress store on every corner. Are people not sleeping well? Are mattresses now made so poorly that they break down easily and must be replaced every five years? Have we spent so much money on everything else that we’re down to mattresses to satisfy our acquisitive needs? Who knew there would be more mattress stores than grocery stores?

With so many baffling things in the world, I’m glad that spring is coming. Already tulip tips are emerging from the soft ground. Tulips are one thing we can count on not to baffle us.

 

 

Where things stand: Allston Interchange

If you live in downtown Boston, you probably know this place from your car only. This is where either you paid your first toll on the Mass Pike after you sailed past BU, or where you got on the pike via a long, winding ramp after driving out from downtown on Storrow Drive. Either way, since you drove, you may not be aware of details you’d be conscious of if you lived in the area or walked through it.

But a task force has been at work for three years on a project that would realign the Mass Pike, re-order the entrance and exits ramps at that location and free up about 100 acres owned by Harvard for redevelopment into streets, sidewalks and buildings—a real part of the city. All this takes place roughly between the Harvard Business School and the BU Bridge.

The plans began because MassDoT realized the Mass Pike viaduct was in need of repair. Coincidentally, the viaduct was adjacent to land, the underlying rights to which Harvard bought in 2000 and 2003. Over a period of about 15 years, Harvard and the rail company CSXT entered into agreements that relocated most of the old rail operations between the Charles River and the Mass Pike to places farther west, and the land was sitting there, waiting. So when MassDoT announced it would have to rebuild the viaduct, after nudging from Allston, which is the neighborhood amid the tangle of ramps, streets, former rail lines and pike roads, everyone said, “Let’s do it right.”

After many community meetings, the planning is almost finished and has come down to three options for the viaduct, said Bob Sloane, who has represented WalkBoston on the task force. But what happens to the viaduct is not as interesting as what happens to the neighborhood.

Remarkably, said Jessica Robertson, a task force member from Allston, the neighborhood and Harvard basically agree on how to move forward. Actually, she used the word, “shocking.” Robertson called what is there now, “a huge waste of urban land.”

Kevin Casey, Harvard’s vice president of public affairs and communications, said Harvard sees huge potential in this project. “We look at the MassDoT approach as a new opportunity,” he said. “It changes the pike’s contours, creates a street grid providing development opportunities for Harvard and the region, while removing longstanding impediments to neighborhood circulation, and makes a nice connectivity between Cambridge and the Longwood area.”

Perhaps not a perfect connectivity between Cambridge and Longwood, but one that is better than the circuitous route people now use.

To help envision where the street grid would be, think about the Doubletree Hotel, isolated among roads and ramps, the elevated Mass Pike and the little building that says Houghton Chemical. The grid would be between that forlorn hotel and about where the Mass Pike is now. That grid would connect to the rest of Allston. The stub of Cambridge Street that becomes River Street in Cambridge at the Charles River would benefit from becoming a street that could be lined with buildings instead of an isolated road for cars.

Because MassDoT could leave the viaduct in place while it creates the new pike alignment this plan would also minimize disruption, Casey pointed out.

This project also provides a chance to deal with some of Allston’s streets that have been compromised by traffic. Robertson hopes that bridges will be repaired and made more friendly to pedestrians. She also hopes the new streets in the grid will be narrow ones that invite strolling rather than becoming wide raceways for cars.

The project includes plans for West Station, a new stop on the South Station-Worcester commuter rail line. Robertson said Allston used to have three stops on a rail line. Bringing one back seems the least that should be done. There is also the possibility of more rail connections to Cambridge and beyond with the Grand Junction line, which goes over the rail bridge under the BU Bridge.

Many devilish details still need to be worked out. One section is narrow. Making room for the park along the river, Storrow Drive, the Mass Pike and rail lines is hard, said Sloane. Whether to build the transit station now or later is also not determined.

Robertson worries about that. “MassDoT has a history of committing to building transit and then the highway is done and transit costs too much and is not built,” she said.

Casey said Harvard has no development plans yet for the area, which is near its enterprise campus along Western Avenue. “[It] will unfold over a long-term process, taking the better part of ten years,” he said. The area would not necessarily be occupied by Harvard buildings only. Robertson hopes for some affordable housing, since Allston, like everywhere else needs such a thing.

The Draft Environmental Impact Report is scheduled for release this fall. Meanwhile, the project’s cost is unknown and how to pay for it isn’t determined, said Patrick Marvin, a spokesperson for MassDoT. There is no official timetable yet either, but Sloane estimates that if everything goes well—a big if—it would be 2021 or 2022 before construction could begin.

Where things stand: Winthrop Square

The proposed 775-foot tower to be built on the site of a grungy city garage started out nicely when plans were unveiled last summer. The developer, Millennium Partners, was largely responsible for revitalization of Washington Street with the Ritz complex, Millennium Place and the Millennium Tower that filled in Vornado’s Filene’s hole. They would pay the city $153 million for affordable housing and park maintenance in the Boston Common and Franklin Park. So far, so good.

Then came a pesky problem.

The tower broke the law. It threw shadows on the Common that were not allowed under the early 1990s state legislation limiting shadows on the Boston Common, the Public Garden and the common in Lynn. (It’s a long story.)

The Friends of the Public Garden, who look after the Common, said no way would they allow illegal shadows. Legislators spoke up. City councilors weighed in. Meetings were held. Letters were written. The Boston Planning and Development Agency offered a compromise—let Winthrop Square, which is not in the Midtown Cultural District, use the shadows left in the “shadow bank,” available only to properties in the Midtown Cultural District, which extends from the Common through Downtown Crossing.

Meanwhile, Logan Airport said the tower might be too high. Rep. Aaron Michlowitz of the North End said nothing would happen unless the city ponies up dollars to support the Greenway. No one has yet offered any compromise.

Complicated stories like this get more complicated, and it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening.

So where do things stand?

I asked four people who are involved with the matter. (Two other people I never reached.) This is apparently where things stand.

The Friends of the Public Garden still oppose the shadow the project casts, said Liz Vizza, the organization’s executive director. Since the city has not filed a home rule petition, Vizza does not know what the city is planning, so she waits.

Her group isn’t passive, however. It mounts letter-writing campaigns, meets with city officials, and has hired a State House lobbyist to help manage whatever legislation is filed.

Potential for compromise on the part of the Friends? Maybe a little gesture. Vizza characterized the shadow trade as “an incremental step toward balancing additional shadow and protecting the park.” She also said she would like to see the city consider how to balance new development and green spaces all over Boston. In Dorchester, South Boston and JP, where many buildings are rising, green spaces have no protection at all.

The rumor mill has it that some think Copley Square needs a shadow law. Would such restrictions sweeten the pot for park advocates? Hard to tell.

Vizza, as well as some legislators I spoke to, want the city to drill down in zoning so everyone knows what’s allowed. But city officials say good luck unless they’ve got a much bigger budget and more staff. Meanwhile everyone wants to take advantage of the best economy in recent memory for development.

Vizza’s big worry is precedent. No comparable city-owned parcels are left in the downtown. But, she wonders, if city officials are blinded by the big bucks this development throws off, what will they do if future developers offer way beyond what they need to in proposing their plan?

Josh Zakim, the city councilor for the neighborhoods around the Common, said it is hard to get a sense of whether the city council would support a home rule petition until the city files its proposal. Zakim would still like to see the developers explain what shadows would be like if the building were at 500 or 600 feet tall. For now, he’s waiting too.

Joe Larkin, Millennium’s point man for Winthrop Square, has been presenting the merits of the proposal to neighborhood groups all over the city, since, as he says, the payoff benefits many neighborhoods.

Larkin said his company will file Form 7460 with Massport within the next 30 days. That will start the process of determining whether 775 feet will fly (sorry) with the airport crowd. He supports the shadow bank trade. “Shadow for shadow is a good deal,” he said.

He has no plans for a design change. His company, like the Friends, has hired lobbyists. “We’re working in an environment we’re not familiar with,” he said, referring to the State House. “It’s the same with the Friends.”

Finally, a few answers came from the BPDA’s Jonathan Greeley. City officials are focused on the money for housing and park maintenance. He says the BPDA, as part of resolving this matter, will “lead a planning effort to better define the future of downtown.”

His spokesperson, Bonnie McGilpin, said the home rule petition will go to the city council in the next few weeks. “The exact substance is still being finalized,” she said in an email.

As to Rep. Michlowitz’s demand, the mayor and he have had a conversation, said McGilpin. So far, the mayor looks as if he’s sticking with his original plan for disbursing the money. Is it a moot point as officials work out with abutters how the Greenway’s maintenance will go forward?

So many moving parts. So many conflicts. So little time.

Finding hope

After the election, Nancy Schön was blue. When faced with sadness, what’s a sculptor to do? She fashions a piece that acknowledges her feelings, yet points toward hope.

The mother dove has a tear in her eye. But her fledgling is rising from a lilac branch that already has buds on it. Laurel leaves lie nearby. This small sculpture, still in wax, shows how an artist conceives of a project, decides how big it will be, plays with the image until it feels right and finally can send it off to the Chelsea foundry to be cast in bronze. Nancy is still playing with the image, so the doves are not finished. But the project is making her feel better.

Nancy, of course, is the renowned sculptor who turned Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings mallards into the bronze statues in the Boston Public Garden. (Her last name is pronounced “Shern.”) Children have been playing on the ducks, and their parents have been taking photographs of those children on the ducks, for almost 30 years.

This remarkable woman showed me around her house and studio the other day so I could tell some of her story.

Nancy lives in a section of Newton that has big, early 20th-century, gorgeous houses. Her pleasant home is filled with the paintings and sculpture of other artists, as well as her own art.

“I’ve always wanted to pursue my love of sculpture, help others and earn a living,” she said. That’s what she is doing.

Nancy is slender and good looking, taking after her mother, who was a beauty herself. She is strong and agile, which comes in handy when she makes such big pieces as a lifesize pig, bear or giraffe. Seven months of the year she swims a quarter of a mile daily in her outdoor pool, which takes up most of her back yard. She works every day in her spacious studio behind the swimming pool, using materials and tools familiar to carpenters, jewelers and plumbers—Styrofoam, steel netting, drywall nails, pipes, scrapers, magnifying glasses, clay, wax, plaster, marble, turntables, wire. She spends lots of time at lumber yards. She follows the Red Sox, goes to symphony and likes places that offer valet parking.

Did I mention that she is 88 years old? She seems at least 25 years younger.

Nancy grew up in Newton in a loving family. Her father ran Harry Quint Florist in the Back Bay, and her mother delivered the flowers. From an early age Nancy was sculpting. “I intuitively knew how things go together,” she said.

She trained at the Museum School, married philosopher, professor and author Donald Schön and had four children, all happy and healthy. Her early sculptures featured many mothers and children. She created images of her husband and children walking in the woods. She made giraffes because Donald was six feet four and told her he sometimes felt like a giraffe. She made sculptures of people waiting, of people climbing. She watched people looking at sculpture and had an insight. “Children patted the cat or stroked the donkey, but paid no attention to the people sculptures,” she said.

Her public art commissions came fast after the ducklings statues were unveiled. First Lady Barbara Bush called on her to reprise Mrs. Mallard and her brood for the children of the then-Soviet Union. Mrs. Bush and Nancy went to Moscow to present the ducks to Raisa Gorbachev. Nancy made a tortoise and a hare for Copley Square to celebrate the Boston Marathon. She made a dragon with a heart at the end of its tail for the Nonquit Street Green in Dorchester. The city of Hamilton, Ohio, commissioned a statue of Lentil and his dog in honor of hometown boy Robert McCloskey, whose first book, Lentil, was believed to be autobiographical.

Nancy made prairie dogs for Oklahoma City to symbolize friendship. She created Eeyore, Piglet and Winnie-the-Pooh for the Newton Free Library. Her raccoons occupy a place of regard in Tennessee, another tortoise and hare live in Arkansas, and the bear Sal met in Blueberries for Sal stands in Boothbay Harbor, Maine’s botanical garden.

Nancy’s husband, Don, died about 20 years ago at age 67 so she had to create a new life for herself. That involved finishing a studio they had planned together and expanding her work with non-profit organizations. She partners with many groups doing good in the world to make works of art—desk-size sculptures, pins, even a zipper pull—to help them raise money or honor volunteers. She was a prime mover in building the skate park near the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge because she believed the kids skateboarding in Copley Square needed a better place to do their tricks. She created a series of small sculptures illustrating 24 of Aesop’s Fables that are still waiting for public home. She spends much time with her children, grandchildren and her first great-grandchild.

She is still working on the doves, trying to decide which composition will capture the hope she strives for. But in a world that contains so much bad news, so many bad actors, so much corruption and so many falsehoods, it is relieving to come upon a good story. It is what Nancy has made of her life that gives everyone hope that good lives can occur.

Class divides?

A few weeks ago I took the T over to Prudential Center. I wanted to check out Eataly, since I’d heard so much about it. Was it really a sign that tradition-bound Boston can handle the latest, greatest retail concept? Would it finally make the Pru cool? Would it edge out the North End as the most Italian place north of New York?

I forgot those questions when I stepped off the escalator on the second floor. Instead I was overwhelmed with the sheer abundance of the place. This was not moldy old Boston.

Fifty kinds of pasta, at least. Wine, cheese, sauce, meats, fish, take-away and restaurants. It was like Harrods’ Food Hall on steroids. Gorgeous displays. Lavish, clean, the lighting strategically designed to make everything beautiful. The fresh-pasta makers drew crowds as they rolled, sliced and nipped at the dough. Plenty of staff were around to answer questions. The one percent would feel at home here.

It reminded me how stratified into class and money our nation has become. The last election illustrated this, as do the reports about how housing in Boston (and other cities) is out of reach for so many.

The stratification seems more obvious now than it used to, and I feared Eataly was only one more example of the divides between the rich, not-so-rich and poor.

We have many examples of the divides. While there has always been stratification in travel, the airlines currently seem to have made it into an art form. The pecking order goes from first class to economy plus, with a bit of extra leg room, down to steerage, where passengers do not have enough space between them and the seat in front to open a laptop. And then the airlines blame the passengers when they get testy.

You can pay to play, and life gets difficult if you don’t. Getting on the plane last means little room in the bins for your belongings. Of course, for $30-plus you can get on earlier. Even JetBlue—formerly the most egalitarian airline—has instituted a class structure on long flights.

Class divisions are common practice in the retirement states. Gated communities are on the rise in Florida, and they are the development mode in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Gated communities are supposed to signify luxury. Instead, they conjure up images of a frightened populace hunkered down, fearful of who-knows-what lurking in the outside world, which they never encounter because they leave the gates only in a locked car headed to a shopping mall patrolled by guards. That doesn’t seem like luxury living to me.

In some ways, however, airline stratification and gated communities’ fake status are just throwaways. They don’t matter much. The real stratification invades such places as higher education and family structure.

Richer students still attend brick and mortar institutions and spend four years doing so. Poorer students and so-called non-traditional students are offered online courses or degrees from for-profit institutions with shaky credentials and uncertain outcomes.

Other options besides Harvard, BU and Northeastern are good; there’s no denying that. But the traditional schools’ extra benefits—providing students time to ponder the world’s literature and history, fostering discussions of life’s big questions into the night with roommates, and providing a setting where classmates will remain friends forever and help connect one another to jobs, mates, and other opportunities—are hard to come by if a student is sitting at a computer mastering course work in isolation.

Marriage is another benefit that has succumbed to a class divide. Marriage typically brings emotional and financial stability for spouses and their children, but for reasons that are only partly understood, those without college degrees are now more likely to have to go it alone than are college graduates.

I pondered these divides as I wandered around Eataly. Then I began to look at the people. The staff was as diverse a group as I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t tell their financial status, but they were young and old and represented every ethnicity and color, so there must be some economic diversity among the workers. A woman handling check-out later told me she liked her job, was satisfied with her pay, and looked forward to getting a promotion soon.

I watched the other patrons. They too were diverse. As far as I could tell they were not only the one-percenters, but came from all the percentages. With the long lines at the cash registers, it looked as if the diverse crowd was stocking up on merchandise that was within reach.

I left feeling better than when I first encountered the store. Maybe Eataly, despite its trendy concept and novel merchandising, is not just a new concept but also a reflection of the cities it occupies—where all kinds of people are readily accepted and everyone feels comfortable, different and together.

Uninhabitable

Samuel Eliot Morison in The Maritime History of Massachusetts describes our state’s liabilities—tumbling, shallow, un-navigable rivers that could never compete with the mighty Hudson or the St. Lawrence; “long-lying snow,” making for a short growing season; shallow soil too close to the underlying granite for successful farming, few natural resources beyond timber, and then there is the ice. Compared to the old country, Massachusetts presented daunting challenges to its early European settlers.

Morison goes on to credit those settlers with turning their liabilities into assets. Our forebears captured the power of the waterfalls that prevented navigation to turn the mill wheel, enabling them to grind wheat and develop industry. They used the snow’s slippery surface to haul big items, possibly the most famous being the captured British cannons that Henry Knox dragged on sleds from Fort Ticonderoga at the beginning of the American Revolution. He made it to Dorchester Heights, where General Washington trained them on the British fleet, which prudently left Boston Harbor on or about March 17, conveniently giving us a secular reason to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Finally, landowners, realizing New England’s soil was mostly only marginally fertile, quarried the underlying granite to build imposing architecture, headstones, curbs and now, kitchen counters. With few natural resources of their own, Massachusetts’ early entrepreneurs shipped other places’ goods. Then they sliced the ice from the ponds into blocks, packed them in sawdust in the holds of ocean-going ships, and sold the ice to tropical countries. I’m told that such entrepreneurs also introduced ice cream to show tropical-landers how to use frozen water.

Clever.

Nevertheless, Morison’s description reminds readers of how uninhabitable America was to early Europeans. It still is. New England? Morison spelled it out. But other regions were and are even more challenging.

The mid-Atlantic states, the South and the Midwest? So hot and humid that British diplomats assigned to Washington, D.C. in the 1800s were allowed to wear Bermuda shorts. Texas— same heat, with the added threat of fire ants. South and the Midwest? Tornedos. The South? Bugs, big ones that bite and give you the creeps, not to mention poisonous snakes and the alligators that would get you if you tried to swim in the fresh-water ponds, rivers and lakes.

Arizona and some of Nevada? October through March is nice enough. But from April on you can’t go outside without collapsing. You will burn your hand if you touch anything outside. I once met a woman who grew up in the state before air conditioning. She said her family dipped their sheets in water before they went to bed and rolled up in them so they would be cool enough to sleep.

Arizonians say you won’t mind the heat because it is dry heat. They say this while sipping margaritas at an air-conditioned bar. They know better than to go outside.

In many other areas of the country you can’t go outside in the summer. That’s one advantage New Englanders have on most summer days. The southern states spend more on air conditioning than we do on heat. What kind of life is that to be forced inside all summer?

Then there is the West Coast, possibly the nicest place in all of America. Unfortunately, California is slowly tipping into the Pacific Ocean. It is wracked with earthquakes, fires and either droughts or floods. Oregon puts up with an active volcano.

With all the threats and challenges to human life in the rest of the country, Morison’s New England looks pretty good. We can still spend many days outdoors in the summer. Winter sports and a cozy fire in a fireplace, if we are lucky enough to have one, keep us going.

Still, we face global warming and sea rise, so that even in relatively livable New England we can expect overheated summers, winters too warm to stop the deadly southern bugs, and the Atlantic Ocean lapping at our doors. According to news reports, we might have to build a sea wall at the entrance to Boston Harbor to keep the rising ocean out.

We might get some solace from the fact the Florida, where the governor refuses to recognize climate change, will soon be a shallow salt marsh. But that also means that New Englanders won’t have Florida to flee to if they can’t stand weather or taxes.

We’ll just have to stay here and face the changes. Grist mills, granite quarries and ice seem pretty benign right now.

The pitfalls of symbols

Super Bowl fever brought up the topic of sports design. Surely you have noticed the Super Bowl trophy. Once in awhile someone mentions its shape, but not much. Apparently two prominent football guys sat down in a restaurant and designed it, and Tiffany made it and continues to make it. Maybe the guys who designed it had small “hands” and didn’t realize what they were doing. Much talk centers on how men make better decisions when women are included in the decision-making. This was clearly a time for a woman to weigh in. The design they came up with, seen from a certain way, is a giant, in your face, phallus. It’s amusing. But it is also embarrassing because the guys don’t seem to realize what they have wrought.

Do the players get a copy of the trophy in addition to the ring? If so, I wonder how Giselle, who seems like one of the more level-headed of celebrities, feels about Tom’s haul lying around the house.

The American football trophy is different in its symbolism from other familiar trophies. The Stanley Cup, English football’s Premier League trophy and the World Series trophy are all taller than they are wide, but you’d never decide these trophies were a literal phallic symbol.

Beyond the Super Bowl trophy design, however, are sports graphics in general. Take the Celtics mascot laminated on the floor in the middle of TD Garden. Years ago, when I first saw it, I was puzzled. I recognized it as a leprechaun, but it could also have been interpreted as a stereotype of a drunk and foolish Irishman, an embarrassment to a whole nation of immigrants. Yet Boston was an Irish town. No one seemed to object to this cartoon. Wasn’t anyone insulted?

I had had experience with symbols. I had spent my university years at an institution that eventually retired Chief Illiniwek because this majestic, elegantly clad warrior, impersonated by a former Eagle Scout who danced to Hollywood-style Native American drumming music, was considered an insult to the confederation of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Peoria and Michigamea tribes, to name a few. Since then opposition to using Native American names for sports teams or images used as mascots grew to the point where most teams relinquished them. Only such teams as the Cleveland Indians, the Washington Redskins and, in Massachusetts, some high schools—think Turners Falls—still carry the names.

While I had mixed feelings about the Chief, that image was never foolish or derogatory. He was tall, robust and manly.

The contrast between majestic Chief Illiniwek and what I thought was the insulting Celtics logo, however, caused me to pay attention to sports mascots and graphics.

Football logos were especially interesting. When I looked at the Patriots’ logo, its “manly” face seemed cartoonish and silly. Its heavy lines reminded me of what a Nazi graphic designer might have drawn. Then I looked more closely. Oh. It was supposed to be a Minuteman, but it didn’t much resemble the graceful statues in either Lexington or Concord. According to the Patriots’ website, the logo, designed in 1993, is called the “Flying Elvis.” Maybe football fans are fine with that inanity, now that it is so old.

The Atlanta Falcons’ logo is even worse in evoking a Nazi symbol. It resembles a side version of the eagle in the emblem of the actual Nazi party. It’s the black stripes that convey the image. How did football logos come to be inspired by Nazis?

Some sports logos are simply baffling. Take a look at the Miami Heat. It’s sort of a complicated fire ball going through a ring. Maybe it means the basketball team is on fire and a player is making a basket. Or maybe it’s simply weird and needs an update. But I have sympathy for the graphic designer. How do you convey heat in a graphic? Sweat? Lethargy? Panting?

Perhaps we have an answer for good names and graphics right at home. John I. Taylor (no relation as far as I know to my husband’s family) decided in 1907 that the red stockings his team wore would inspire its name. That decision prevented future disputes, insulted no one, and allowed a graphic to be designed that was at the same time emblematic as well as rather sweet.

Going back to the Celtics logo, however, are the Irish. This immigrant nationality has been one of the most financially successful of any in America. Once you’ve reached that status, who cares how anyone depicts you?

Thinking about taxis, rather than something else

It’s oppressive. You can’t get away from the Trump chaos. Everyone talks about it. Walk down the street, meet a friend. Immediately they bring it up even if you don’t want to hear it. A friend who is skiing in Vermont emailed me about meeting for dinner. But then she ended with, “what’s to become of our nation?”

A Scottish relative even got into the fray when she took a bus back to Lossiemouth from Elgin. An elderly woman near her told her she pitied the “poor Americans.”

“They niver thought in a the days o man that that absolute fool o a man wid be in the White Hoose,” she said. “And now I hiv tae ging back into Elgin again the night tae join the protest.”

Who knew elderly Scottish ladies would be protesting in far-north Elgin at night?

I try not to think about the nation’s problems unless I hear something funny. Thank goodness for the online Borowitz Report and Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, the New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin and Rachel Maddow, whose news is filled with irony and glee at the latest absurdity.

My most successful tactic, however, is to think about banal things instead of scary ones. Taxis come to mind. Life in Boston would be better if we had better taxis. Let’s think about them instead of something else.

Like telephone booths and typewriters, they are a relic of another age. There are the same number of taxi medallions in the city as in past years, according to the media relations department of the Boston Police Department, but there seem to be fewer taxis on the streets. This is hard to verify, however, since no one can tell me how many are actually on the streets.

But taxis don’t have to become relics. They have one advantage over Uber and Lyft. You can stand at a street corner and hail them. And you can find them at taxi stands—the one behind City Hall and in front of 225 Franklin are particularly convenient. If you can find one quickly, they are quicker than Lyft, for whom you have to wait. While taxis are more expensive, it’s usually only a few dollars difference. It won’t break the bank.

But taxis make it hard to love them. Signs pasted on the dirty, clunky divider urge passengers to stay loyal. But who can stay loyal to cramped quarters, no indication that a cab is available when it approaches you, clumsy payment options, hostility if you pay by credit card, annoying blather coming from a small television screen and a lack of air conditioning in the summer?

If taxis are to remain on the streets of Boston, they must up their game. Here are some modest proposals.

Put a light on the top of every cab that says if it is available or not. New York City cabs can manage that simple piece of information. So can DC’s cabs. It’s welcoming and efficient to know that the taxi coming toward you can stop for you.

Get rid of the divider between the driver and the passenger. These were installed long ago after a couple of cab drivers were assaulted. But that occurs rarely. Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC, taxis do not have that bulky barrier that prevents easy exchange with the driver and air conditioning from flowing through. And those places aren’t as safe as Boston.

The unsightly barrier makes it hard for passengers to get in and out and have a place for their feet. A barrier-free ride would make a passenger’s ride more comfortable and make that passenger more inclined to take a taxi rather than Lyft, which is always more comfortable.

Make taxi service regional rather than city-based. Surely if Amazon can figure out how to deliver packages everywhere, some smart person should be able to plan how to deploy cabs all over Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, for starters, with efficiency and standardization. It is annoying to realize that the cab coming toward you near is not supposed to pick you up even if it is empty.

Boston also has its job to do. Taxi medallions are like liquor licenses. They should not be able to be bought and sold in a private market. They should go to one cab and be retrieved when that cab is out of commission. They should be affordable for individual drivers. They should be issued with public comfort and accessibility in mind and not for the benefits and convenience of big owners.

If the taxis don’t make these changes, they’ll descend into the junk yards where Compaq computers and Walkman devices have gone. No one will miss them or be sorry. And we’ll have to go back to thinking about Trump.

A recipe for cooking

Take one old hot dog factory. Add two big kitchens, eight convection ovens, 12 food truck spaces, several 15-gallon mixers, a frying pan logo, a 1,800 square-foot refrigerator and 45 start-ups. Stir in $15 million of public money, tax credits and donations. Cook for seven years while raising money, renovating the factory, and getting up to speed. Top it off with an executive director who knows her stuff.

Serve it to Bostonians at the Boston Public Market, the Greenway and commercial outlets all over the city.

Enjoy, as waiters say. You’ve just gotten the recipe for the CommonWealth Kitchen, a non-profit company in an old Pearl Hot Dog facility that nurtures start-up food businesses and also cooks for bigger but still personal food businesses that are so successful they can’t do it by themselves.

My friend Sally and I drove out to Dorchester, where the facility is, to see what was happening. I’d heard about this place from people at the Boston Public Market, since CWK, as is it known, prepares pasta for Nella Pasta and foods for other Boston Public Market vendors.

It helps to have the equivalent of a world-class chef managing the kitchens. That’s Jen Faigel. People like her are both commonplace and extraordinary. On the one hand, they’ve done what everyone is supposed to do. They’ve found their niche, educated themselves, gotten experience, grabbed an idea and made a success of themselves and their passion. On the other hand, when you find people like that, they seem rare.

Jen had worked in affordable housing, real estate development and economic development. The Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation was planning to tear down the decrepit factory and build affordable housing. Neighbors said no. “We want to keep jobs here,” they said. “What good is affordable housing if people can’t work?”

That was in 2009. By 2010, Jen, who’d been on the board of the former CropCircle Kitchen in JP, was brought in as a consultant by the Dorchester EDC to help create a food incubator that took advantage of the special conditions the 1910 factory offered. In 2014, Jen became the executive director of CWK, which absorbed CropCircle, and it opened with two kitchens.

One is for folks who have an idea for a food product, but don’t have the facilities or the know-how to make their favorite sauce, pickles or cake into a real business. Those budding entrepreneurs sign up at $35 an hour to use the large equipment CWK provides. Along with the space, they get instruction on crafting a business plan, getting the proper permits, scaling recipes, packaging their product, maintaining food safety, and handling finances, insurance and all the other nuts and bolts of running a small business.

So far, 45 businesses, including the Clover Food Lab, Roxy’s Grilled Cheese and McCrea’s Candies, have gone through the program and grown to the point where they’re on their own.

Forty-five small businesses are now sharing the large kitchen. They include Sweet Teez Bakery, whose owner, Teresa Thompson Maynard, arrived while we were visiting to make her cookies, cakes and cupcakes. “I left corporate on January 16,” she said. “CWK really helped me know what I’m doing.”

She needed the help, she said, since she admitted burning the first cake she baked in the large convection oven.

Grace Connor, aged 17, was also in the kitchen while we were visiting. This tall, thin South End girl was making cookie dough ice cream for Little G, her nascent ice cream venture.

Jen said a Boston police officer makes chutney at CWK, but we didn’t meet her.

On the other side of CWK’s entrance is the second kitchen, devoted to cooking for outside vendors whose facilities can’t handle the volume they need. While we were there, three women were baking cookies and also preparing a bloody Mary mix for Alex’s Ugly Sauce. Owner Alex Bourgeois now has his sauce in every Whole Foods on the East Coast, so he is experimenting with new products.

CWK also makes sauce for Mei Mei Street Kitchen and pumpkin puree for Harvard’s dining services. In the fridge were fifty pounds of cilantro, which shows the volume CWK can handle. Nearly 60 percent of the fresh ingredients are local, Jen said proudly.

CWK has relationships that connects its businesses to lenders when the start-ups need investment to expand. It constantly cleans the fans, floors, drains and equipment. It creates a community of cooks who can keep in touch after they disperse.

CWK has 14 staff members and a $1.6 million budget, with 50 percent from earned income, matched with grants and fund-raising. Within five years, Jen projects earned income will cover 85 percent of CWK’s costs. She has space for more start-ups.

So if you are intent on creating your own culinary sensation and offering it to the world, contact Jen. Everything you need to sign up is at www.commonwealthkitchen.org.