> that familiar smell came rushing right back

BC students that forgot to bathe in the last month? >:)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

I used to live in Boston as well. Boy do I miss it!

I'm sure there is a building on Park Drive I haven't lived in, but I'm not sure which one it might be. That the neighborhood is still standing impresses me. Whichever apartment I was living in usually felt strangely slanted, suggesting the building could well be returning to the bog from which it arose. I like Boston for a lot of reasons: the Brookline Booksmith's Writers series, the city's walkability, Bread & Circus and Park Street Station. But there's something hard about the city that has never been reconciled in my mind. Overall people seem meaner than people I meet elsewhere, but then I look at their voting habits and I'm confused. One day I might figure it out, but perhaps Boston is too much like family: I can't get the kind of objectivity required to see it clearly. I love it but at the same time I can't seem to function very well around it: there's something about it that throws me. So I live somewhere else.

I find myself missing Boston from time to time, though I haven't lived there for years. I grew up in Scituate and I remember my dad driving my brother and I into the city for the first time at night when we were really little. There was such a magic to it... all of the lights and activity. I remember asking if it was Christmas because it was so dazzling and beautiful. Then getting to be a bit older, old enough for the folks to drop off a friend and I at the Quincy T so we could spend the day cruising all the used record shops like Planet, Mystery Train, In Your Ear and Nuggets. I ended up moving to the city in college and staying there for a good five or six years, following the cheaper rents from Boston to Brighton and eventually to JP. I was a cyclist... never had a car, and because of that, I feel like I got to know the city in a really intimate way... sometimes it felt like "my" city. I loved it! But for every aspect that I loved, there were also things I came to despise. The gentrification of every last affordable neighborhood, the smell of stale pee in every dark corner, and the winters where you develop back problems just looking down all the time trying to avoid slipping and falling on poorly shoveled sidewalks. Turns out, I'm just not a city girl anymore. I'm living in Ashland Oregon these days and absolutely loving it.... though there are many, many times where I find myself missing the grit and sarcasm that I grew up with. Boston is a special city and I'm looking forward to adventuring there again someday.

I am not from Boston but Braintree, have been in Florida since 1992, but I go visit my mom in West Roxbury every year, I miss Boston, it is a great place to be from