Prepared for my Storytelling assignment with Tony Woodcock, President of NEC:
A few days after arriving in Boston, I happened to find
myself at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As I walked into the atrium of
the main house, I found a courtyard setting that I did not imagine from having
seen the outside. An early 1900s façade hid a Roman-inspired courtyard with
Gothic windows, topiary and an original mosaic of Medusa. A sense of calm and
peace came over me in the face of such a beautiful setting. This helped to ease
the emotions I was experiencing after some recent traumatic events.
A few days before, I had been travelling from Tanzania for
over forty hours when I finally arrived at 18 Dalrymple St at 9.30 in the
evening. I had been assured by my soon-to-be flatmates that the key to the flat
would be in an envelope with my name on it in the mailbox. Examining all three
mailboxes yielded no mail of any sort, let alone a key. In the true British
spirit of ‘Keep calm and carry on’, I went through several options. These
included furiously and repeatedly pressing the doorbells to the three
apartments in the building. No success. Then I tried trundling my luggage up
and down the street to find 7 Dalrymple St where I knew the landlord lived.
Myself and several other inhabitants of Dalrymple St were unable to find the
location of this phantom house. So I walked back to the T station hoping to
phone a taxi who might be able to take me to a hotel or hostel that would let
guests check in past ten o’clock. I only had a Tanzanian phone and so had to
remember how to use a pay phone, and ordered a taxi that said it would arrive
in fifteen minutes. I also phoned the number I had for my soon-to-be flatmate
who didn’t answer her phone. I sat outside the T station for about an hour and
no taxi showed up. I started to contemplate the relative comforts of sleeping
on the front porch or in the bushes by the trash bins.
In the meantime, the lovely lady at the T help desk had come
over to see if I was alright. She started off by asking me where I was from.
She had heard me order the taxi and thought that I had excellent English.
Thanks I said, I’m from the UK. She replied by saying, Do they speak English
there? Luckily before I could launch into a detailed linguistic history of the
English language, which she obviously needed, a man came over to report
something. He told us that he had observed a man coming off the train, dumping
a microwave on the wall outside the station, and then going back into the
station. Of course, this is suspicious behaviour so the lovely lady at the T
had to call the Boston Transport Police.
An awesome policewoman turned up shortly after and examined
the microwave which she deemed to be an innocent piece of kitchen equipment after
all. She and the lovely lady at the T were discussing this, when the lovely
lady at the T told the awesome policewoman about my predicament. The awesome
policewoman happened to know a place that was fairly cheap, so she phoned them
up and booked a room for me. Check-in closed at midnight and it was already
11.30. So of course the only way I could get there in time was by police
escort.
So my first day in Boston was finished by a high speed
journey with sirens blaring through downtown Boston to get to the hotel in time.
You can imagine what people were thinking when I arrived at this hotel at
midnight in a police car – the faces of the other guests in the reception were
pretty priceless. They weren’t impressed with my story of having been stranded
and then saved by a lovely lady at the T and an awesome policewoman.
I am sure that Isabella Stewart Gardner would have approved
of rescuing abandoned stray artists from the streets of Boston, and might have
even given me refuge in her Museum, so that I could recover from my ordeal by
relaxing by a Roman fountain. This story also shows that many are unaware that
dumping microwaves saves lives.
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