Narnia in the Longwood Medical District

I've been in Narnia, and it's this sweet alleyway next to a hospital in the Longwood Medical District.  I found it yesterday, along with three of the dudes from the room downstairs (Ben, Jon, Nate), when we went for a wander of a walk to nowhere in particular.  We started the same way up Huntington that took me to the weird fish thing that I talked about in my last posting.  I wanted to show it to them.

After that, we wandered further in that direction, but off the main road of Huntington, and into the depths of the Longwood Medical Area, which is where most of Boston's major hospitals and medical centers are located.  We saw a number of cool things - giant glass buildings, fancy Greco-Roman Harvard Med school, what looked like the bridge to Rivendell.  We even took the advantage of some sweet irony by eating 7-11 Dreammm Donuts under a sign pointing to the Diabetes Center.  But the coolest thing of all, I thought, was something we wandered into almost right off the bat.

I decided to return there today.  I couldn't take sitting in my room arguing with technology anymore.  Every piece of electronics I have to deal with is not functioning properly, except for my cell phone, and even it's being eccentric, giving me beeps as a reminder of events three weeks in advance when I tell it to remind me ten minutes before.  My computer is having trouble.  It's destroying my Real Jukebox playlists every other day and it took three reboots to get disk defrag to start running.

And don't get me started on my overhead light.  It works sometimes, and once it's on it doesn't stop, but when you turn that thing off, you never know when that damn thing will start working again.  It just flickers on a very low level, providing a tremendous risk for epileptics, I'd say.  Thank goodness it only gives me a huge fucking headache.

Even out here, this technology problem is killing me.  I brought a digital camera for pictures of the fish thing and "Narnia" and it ran out of batteries after five shots.  And this pen?  Not looking like it has alot of ink left, so it's being stingy and I really have to press.

But anyway, back to Narnia.  You turn into this alley thing that leads down into what looks like a parking garage for one of the eight trillion hospitals in the Longwood Medical District.  But if you go up and over the entrance to the underground garage, there's this muddy/grassy lane enclosed by evergreen trees that seems lonely and abandoned.

A little way in, there's a park bench up against the outer wall of the hospital, that's caked mud and has a plastic canopy overhead.  Today there are four shiny park benches lined up beside (without torn up plastic canopies overhead).  I'm not sure that they were there when I was there yesterday.  Lying all across the ground in front are old lamp posts, the kind you would imagine being in Victorian London, the same kind that Lucy finds in the beginning of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.  It's so weird.  And the pine trees bordering and shading the entire enclave make it seem even weirder, especially as you walk out the other end, through a narrow gap in the trees, from this secluded world into a... parking lot.

I'm sitting not far away, on  a concrete block thing with a vent on top in the middle.  In the sod next to it, little flowers are blooming.  It's Spring (at least for now).  The walk here had a distinctly different feel.  All the snow and ice that been sticking forever had finally melted and dried, revealing all the cold, dried leaves from the fall before.  And on the street behind the MFA, they were blowing all over, like on a windy fall day.

The air had that slight chill to it, too, like it's the last warm day before a long chill, not one of the first days of a new Spring.  Next to the Wentworth dorms was a pumpkin, smashed on the sidewalk.  At that point, I wondered if I'd slipped into a time warp from March 23rd to November 1st.  Maybe that's why the reminder on my phone went off this morning.  April 10th slipped by in a couple of minutes two and a half hours ago.  Weird.

But then I feel the sun again, so bright and warm today.  Nope, this must still be March 23rd.