Boylston Street

He said, "Hey, man, come up here before you go." He says, "You know, since I know you, it makes sense that you wouldn't really like Giant Steps that much.

Have you ever heard the quartet, the John Coltrane Quartet?" And I said, "No." And he says, "Well, you know, go around the corner and grab one of those copies of, of any record by that group." We had a record store on Boylston Street called Looney Tunes, and he said, "Go to Looney Tunes and get one." And they just happened to have for sale, for about five bucks, the very first one called Coltrane.

And yeah, that, that, that blew my socks off.

When I heard that, I was like, "Oh, my God." And I was an alto player at that time.

And I tell every runner I ever talked to that thinks about going there and doing it, there is nothing in the world like it.

You cannot prepare your body and mind for entering Boylston Street.

And it's lined with fans.

It gives you chills.

And then, you know, something like 2,200 people showed up and, uh, overwhelmed the capacity, even at the Hynes Convention Center, for, like, a day event.

There were, you know, lines that went for hours and down Boylston Street.

So I had the nice fortune of meeting the very kind Boston Fire Marshal and, uh, some very nice state police, uh, actually-

[laughs] We have the best fire, fire fighters in the world

... yeah, everybody's very nice, but they were wondering, like, what is going on? Why are there, you know, lines and lines of people running down Boylston Street? So I think they had to do some traffic mitigation, and eventually we got everybody in, but had to shut down the event according to state police by 5:30.

They're asking like, "What is this?" And I was like, "Well, it's a career fair for AI." And you know, one of the things that AI gets a bad rap for, um, is, you know, as a terminator of jobs, right?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm

And I remember I went and had my first big league meal with Mike McFarland and Tim Wakefield.

We went to Capital Grill on Boylston Street in downtown Boston and I got to know the man, not just as a Bugs Bunny pitcher, knuckleballer, but I got to know him as a Christian and getting to pray with him.

And he just died a couple of years ago.

He's a faithful Christian man, but lived that heroic life like Jimbo and like Father Burke has challenged us to do today.

Were you to see her you would say that Annabelle Lee is only a very pretty little black and terracotta and white statue of a Japanese woman, and forthwith you would be greatly mistaken.

It is true that she has stood in extremely dusty torrents file in a Japanese shop in Boylston Street for months before I found her.

It is also true that I fell instantly in love with her, and that on payment of a few strange dollars to the shopkeeper I rescued her from her surroundings and bore her out to where I live by the sea, the sea where these wonderful wide green waves are rolling, rolling, rolling always.

Annabelle Lee hears these waves, and I hear them, at times holding our breath and listening until our eyes are strained with listening and with some haunting terror, and the low rushing goes to our two pale souls.

For though my friend Annabelle Lee lived dumbly and dustily for months in the shop in Boylston Street as if she were indeed but a porcelain statue, and though she was purchased with a price, still my friend Annabelle Lee is exquisitely human.

There are days when she fills my life with herself.

She gives rise to manifold emotions which do not bring rest.

But other times I look up, and perchance her eyes will meet mine with a look that is cold and penetrating and contemptuous and confounding.

There's a little brunette in Boston you sort of drop in on every once in a while.

Well, shall I give you her address? 91753 Boylston Street.

Yeah.

You'd like your wife to know about her? And the newspapers? Well, I thought not.

In other words, life was perfect.

As dark set in and my friend and I were in an hour, we were an hour deep into drinking and eating, Corona with Lyme, of course, I happened to glance out the window and notice a woman running down Boylston Street.

What caught my attention was that she had some major physical challenges.

Not to mention she was probably in her mid to late 60s.

We can even place him quite precisely within the city.

Thomas and two of his brothers lived for a time at 83 Essex Street, and very close by at 21 Boylston Street, Kent worked for Thomas Noonan, a Catholic publisher and church furnishing business.

So we can actually picture him, a young man from Cassilines walking through Boston to work, in a Catholic publishing house surrounded by one of the most politically and culturally active Irish communities in the whole of North America.

And the publishing world suited him.

It felt cool.

I mean, people have talked about that kind of in the past of making that like right on Hereford, left on Boylston.

And it's weird doing that not as a part of the Boston Marathon, because I think that's something we both talked about as like an eventual goal of wanting to run the Boston Marathon and experience kind of getting to that place for the first time at the finish.

But I think it was really cool kind of just getting to run all the way down Boylston.

You go further down, you go past the public library all the way to the Boston Public Garden.

There were lots of people out there kind of enjoying just a beautiful June day.