OK, that may be a bit of a stretch but where else can you see a guy play a fire extinguisher, tell me that.
(The image is from the University of Iowa Libraries via the Library of Congress and its excellent American Memory collection, a national treasure, and I take back what I said about Iowa this one time.)
I don't spend as much time in Boston as I'd like to but I do like the place. It's a smallish city, as opposed to a biggish city, but it seems bigger than it is because when most people think of Boston they include a bunch of close-in suburbs - in other words, Boston proper (but that sounds a little bit redundant, doesn't it?). And it has a whole lot of schools. It has so many schools it feels like you're back in the Student Union when you ride the subway there.
In Boston they call the subway the T. You'd think with so many schools around they could come up with a whole name, but T is as far as they've got so far. But it's a good subway, as opposed to a bad subway. They have entertainers at the subway stations (maybe Jack Griffin himself is down there somewhere, who knows) and various other amazing things.
When I was in the Army and stationed at the nearby (but no longer) Ft. Devens I went to Boston one weekend and saw a woman driving a car through the subway tunnel. I thought that was pretty amazing but I didn't know then what I know now about how people in Boston drive. Anyway the Boston subway cars, some of them at least, look like cars, as opposed to trains - specifically, they look like streetcars when they are running on a track in the middle of the street, which they do when they're not in a tunnel (are you still with me here?), and so I suppose this woman was driving along behind a streetcar and when it went into a tunnel she did too, and couldn't get back out. So there she was. Bumping along, behind the streetcar. Which was now a subway car. And looking a little bit confused. The woman, I mean, not the subway car. If you see what I mean.
I don't know if people still drive in the subway tunnel in Boston although they might, because the only other tunnel they have to drive in leaks. It's called the Big Dig and it was built by a big, politically well-connected American contracting firm I'm not going to mention the name of here (but it starts with "B" and rhymes with "rectal"). It runs under the harbor or the river or whatever, and it went so far over budget it could have become a bridge. But it didn't, and so there it sits. And leaks. I'm not sure I'd want to drive in it myself. But knowing - as I do now - how people in Boston drive, I'm thinking they are all so used to the idea of a horrible and sudden death that they don't mind.
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