An Afternoon On Tremont Street

My husband and I had doctors’ appointments, one for me in Quincy at 10 or so in the morning preceded by an appointment to have x-rays taken, and one for him near Kenmore Square at 4:30pm.  We decided to go together, “make a day of it, a fun outing,” the words still ring in my ears, although I forget which of us uttered them.  A search of the downtown Boston movie houses revealed that “Before Midnight” was the only acceptable film available, and since we had seen the earlier two films that Delpe and Hawke had made, and had been keen on taking this one in, the projected “outing” just got more fun.  The appointments in Quincy went smoothly, I learned many new and important things about arthritis in my knee and hip, got a cortisone injection, and sailed forth with the confidence of the guy I used to be before the awful explosion of pain in my left knee on our trip to London a few weeks ago.  We stopped in South Station simply because we were hungry and we like the grilled cheese sandwiches that are made by some concession in the train station’s waiting room.  Onward we went underground again to Park Street Station.  Armed with the knowledge that my leg and hip pains had been the direct result of too much stair climbing in London’s tube system, I resolutely determined to take escalators and elevators.  Park Street seemed to have but one measly elevator to get to which required maneuvering through a quivering mass of humanity standing precariously on a much too narrow platform between the north and southbound tracks, but find it we did, and joined the queue which consisted of among other things a young mother with one of those modern baby carriages the size of a mini pick up in which the tiny tot seemed almost lost.  With some ingenuity we all managed to board the box which carried us up to the level of the Green Line.  Here the crush of humanity resembled downtown Delhi at its peak.  Clearly no train had appeared in some time to haul off any of those waiting.  Was it the rain? Boston’s underground trains can get temperamental on bad weather days.  We had noticed on the train ride up from Quincy that the rainfall was increasingly dramatic.  The cold damp seemed to be overriding the cortisone shot in my knee, so I suggested we walk to the movie theater near Boylston on Tremont.  Outside in the rain, wind and cold, the only pleasant distraction as we tried to move along under our umbrellas was glancing at the Boston Common which in its springtime planting resembled an ambitious square in any major European city.  (As an Italian friend of mine said when first visiting me in Boston “Why do Americans make such a fuss about going to Europe when they can get the same effect by coming to Boston?”)  It was the first time I had walked along Tremont Street in maybe twenty years so I was not prepared for the dramatic increase of the student population in that area.  I guess the little old Boston ladies have all died with none to replace them; the Boston I once knew, something that always seemed so stable from 1945 until the end of the twentieth century, was evidently gone.  We entered the movie cineplex to find a great crowd in the lobby, whether sheltering from the driving rain or organizing to go in groups to some film was unclear.  They all seemed to be fifteen years old tops, and as I glanced at the array of titles on offer, I saw that except for “Before Midnight” this was indeed a center for teen action films.  After we had taken our seats in the darkened auditorium we were treated to--assaulted by is better--advertisements for television shows of varying degrees of gore and violence which were followed by previews of coming attractions for movies I did not even know existed let alone would consider going to.  Twenty minutes of unbearable views of violence, sounds of violence, abrupt visual and audial transitions, violent in themselves, almost undid me.  Then at last the film which brought us back to our senses, to civilization, urbanity, intellectuality, taste, tact, goodwill, ending ironically in the verbal psychic violence of a deeply committed married couple.  Thank you, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.