random thoughts – Day 2,358 (Saturday) – once upon a time in boston

Spending Friday in Boston has me feeling nostalgic for the city and what was and might have been. When I was in college in my early twenties, my limited thoughts of the future didn’t extend very far. 

The furthest my “vision” extended was to age 27, which, for some reason, was going to the magical year that launched the rest of my life. I pictured myself at 27, working in a posh Boston ad agency and living in an apartment in Boston with brick walls and wood beams. I saw it as the point in time where I would be making headway in a great career and had a busy and fulfilling social life. Basically, I would have my sh*t together.

Janet, Monica, and Me on the dorm roof.

The image was reinforced when I spent a semester at Chamberlayne Junior College in Boston. I just really needed to get out of Fitchburg and applied to a school with a fashion design program that was advertised in the fashion magazines I read. I was starting during the winter semester and the design program started only in the fall, so I studied advertising and retail because I couldn't wait any longer for an escape.

Our classrooms and dormitories were in amazing historic buildings on Commonwealth Avenue. The dorms were between Fairfield and Gloucester and two blocks from The Prudential Center. The female dorm was once a hotel and had a marble staircase in the lobby, tall windows, and fireplaces in some of the rooms (not functional). Bathrooms had a small shower and were shared by two or three rooms.

My room overlooked Public Alley 434 with a view of the back door of the laundromat. It had a sink (very odd feature, but probably a big deal when the place was new). Once, my roommate and I had our illegal hot plate turned on and one of us used the blow dryer and blew out the electricity in the building. Sometimes a few of us went up onto the roof to hang out.

Classmates Heidi and Debi lived on the same floor that I did and because we were all of legal drinking age, we spent time having white wine spritzers and Tanqueray and tonics at Daisy Buchanon’s on Newbury and Fairfield (closed in 2014) and Friday’s on Newbury and Exeter (closed in 2005). Debi worked at Bloomingdale’s. I worked at Casual Corner. 

At the end of the semester, after the fashion show and the ceremony where some of my friends graduated, goodbyes were said and I went back home to Fitchburg and eventually returned to Fitchburg State. A few semesters later, armed with a freshly minted marketing degree, I couldn’t find a job in Boston, panicked, and took a minimum wage bank teller job in Fitchburg. And that was the beginning of the end of the Boston dream.

Every time I have been on Comm Ave in the decades since, (including Friday), I look for the old classroom and dorm buildings of the now defunct Chamberlayne Junior College. The Boston trips have been fewer and farther between and it is harder to remember the buildings each time. Internet searches informed me that my old dorm became part of Berklee College of Music after Chamberlayne’s demise and is now an apartment building.

The pace, traffic, and buzz of the city were a topic of conversation yesterday. Neither my friend nor I think we could live in Boston now. We both live in the same quiet little city 1.5 hours to the west, and Boston now feels a little overwhelming. It’s a wonderful place to visit, but there is no place quite like a home on a quiet street with turkeys in the yard. At least I have the memories of that minute of being young and vibrant in Boston, living on Comm Ave, working in retail on Boylston Street, and visiting the cool spots in between.