Well played

Monday 15 July 2019

“What a primo day,” my astrological twin Jack Dumpert proclaims as we reach our room on the eighth floor of the Hilton Back Bay Boston a little before midnight. “We filled it up nicely.”

Given plenty of open hours before the Boston Red Sox-Toronto Blue Jays night game in Fenway Park and no particular places to go, we find a few.

First, some place for a morning meal, which this pricey hotel does not provide. No problem. We can practically fall out the front door into Flour Bakery & Café, a tiny corner shop with a high rating on yelp.com. I opt for lunch – the house smoked salmon and summer bean salad with black quinoa – and feel like a health nut.

On Sunday, I spotted a big Barnes & Noble store on the second floor of the Prudential Center a couple blocks away and I reckon it has the new Santana CD. And so it does. Jack checks to see if a certain book, “Liminal Dreaming” by Jennifer Dumpert, is in stock. It’s not in the store, the clerk says, but we can order it.

We walk the length of a glitzy shopping mall in the Prudential Center that has stores that never dream of coming to Buffalo. Like Eataly, which makes Whole Foods look like a dollar store. The produce section is so perfectly arranged it seems curated. Not surprisingly, cherries that cost $5 a pound in the Lexington Co-op are $8.95 at Eataly.

Exiting onto Boylston Street, we have needs. I need to track down a pharmacy – I ran out of the toiletry that nobody thinks they’ll ever run out of until they suddenly do – dental floss. And Jack needs to tap a Bank of America ATM for cash, a need complicated by the fact that access to the BofA branch opposite the Prudential Center is blocked by an active backhoe.

But BofA branches are as abundant as Dunkin Donut shops in this town. Another one is just three blocks away. Walking there in the noontime sun (86 degrees and humid) convinces us to retreat back to the conditioned air of the Prudential Center, where one of the street-level storefronts houses a Tesla salesroom.

We do a sit-down in the Model X, Tesla’s new SUV. Awesome control screen. A swept-back windshield apparently inspired by Elon Musk’s receding hairline. A price tag of $99K. We tell the sales guy we’ll invest in Elon’s solar roof shingles first.

When we emerge again at mid-afternoon, it’s to position ourselves near our evening destination. A likely staging area is Sweet Cheeks, a smoke-scented barbecue joint just past the ballpark on Boylston which I spotted on a foodie website that raved about its biscuits.

The biscuit (we share just one) exceeds its reviews – huge, fluffy and served with ever-so-lightly honeyed butter. That, and an irresistibly sweet barmaid named Alyssa who says she has come from New Jersey to Boston to study so she can do good things for the world, inspire us to hang at the bar for a second round of local craft beers and more to eat.

We split a lunch platter of pulled pork, pulled chicken, one barbecue rib and collard greens, splashed with sauces that put Dinosaur BBQ’s to shame. One shared serving turns out to be plenty. Once we hit the ballpark, I have no appetite left for a Fenway Frank.

Our seats in America’s Most Beloved Ballpark, which seems cavernous after McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, are in the lower loges on the first-base side. From maybe 20 rows behind the Red Sox dugout, we feel intimate with the guys on the field.

As the first pitch is thrown, however, our marvelous view is blocked by a swarm of vendors carrying their wares on their heads in trays and boxes. Peanuts, half a dozen kinds of beer, soda, water, pizza, burgers, ice cream, Fenway Franks, there’s no end to them. They return again and again all through the game.

And what a wild game it is, at least to start. It takes more than an hour and a half to play the first three innings, after which the score is Red Sox 10, Blue Jays 4. At that rate, they’ll still be batting at midnight, like the Sox did when they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 12 innings on Sunday.

But a lot of pitching changes have a way of settling things down and speeding up the pace of play, at least until the Jays erupt for four runs in the top of the eighth inning.

The Sox don’t want to let this one slip away, so they bring in their terminator, their ace reliever, Brandon Workman, for the ninth. The Jays are snuffed, 10-8, and 35,616 fans are outta there.

It’s a joyous throng that boils out onto Boylston. We flow with it all the way past the Fens and the Berklee College of Music, where students are still walking the streets with instruments slung over their shoulders, and a couple blocks further to our hotel, where our fine day gets a final toast in the bar. Well played all around.