Permeability

I am going to marry the former roommate of a colleague of a friend of a friend. The connection is bizarre to begin with, but it reflects the unique kind of links that can happen in a small city. With fewer variables, fewer 'actors,' and smaller geography, all sorts of connections are possible, and people are more open to them. Would that friend of a friend (who I had barely known) come to my birthday party in an unfamiliar part of town with the roommate of her collegaue (who she had just met) in a bigger city known for odd characters and occasional violence?


That's not the only story. I have a longtime collaboration with a musician I met through the kindness of another stranger, who passed his name on to me after I introduced myself. I contact others I barely know to arrange gigs, and they often come on board with enthusiasm and professionalism. I was hired to fundraise for an organization through a person that had somehow found my business card, but had never met me. While the ice is thick here in social matters, at least in professional contacts, it hardly exists.


The smallness of the city and the physical setups of some institutions also fosters connections in serendipitous and productive ways. With few inhabitants and relatively lull street traffic, you are certain to make eye contact with people on the street, and to encounter people more than once. Coming out of a door of a music school downtown, I locked eyes with a trombonist I knew from undergrad days, and a joyful reunion followed. Attending an afternoon writing class, I sat directly in front of another friend from college, and we've since stayed in touch. Smallness can also bite you in the ass, with its sharp little fangs. You meet people you'd rather not see again, like your rival or that guy you had a couple of awkward dates with. Not that I've had that experience. Twice.


I work in the Longwood Medical Area, likely one of the few places in the world where medical researchers can collaborate and learn from each other across numerous institutions and disciplines. The hospitals and institutes found in Longwood are often affiliated with Harvard in some way, which extends its long arms to muscle up its medical school. But before that, I'm not sure how so many hospitals founded by different groups grew up in just a few square miles of each other.

And although New York stories team with strangers merrily interacting with each other, they are interesting only in that they seem so incongruous in a city where you most likely will never see your neaighbors and shop clerks rarely look you in the eye. Within my first few hours of living in Boston I had a harmless conversation on a park bench with someone new. Last fall, while shopping for wedding books, the clerk in Borders volunteered that his sister had gone nuts during her wedding planning, affecting their relationship years later. He advised me not to do the same, and a man in the next aisle concurred. A few weeks ago, I walked past an unusual sidewalk sale, where I stopped for a moment and bought a plastic purple necklace and a little toucan doll that lights up its beak when you pull a handle. I chatted with the proprietress. After 20 years in Boston, she said, she was moving out for a change. Maybe San Fran, maybe Europe, maybe Central America. Boston had been a good place for her, she went on, but she felt a need for a new chapter.


Maybe that summarizes what this place is most of all. For those of us coming in from elsewhere, it is where we can safely find our way and meet our people, and leverage these experiences for the next step. But in any case, Boston inspires a peculiar breed of pride found in few other places, apparent both in the locals in the occasional outsider....