Book launch event for The View From Third Street Went Great!
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So pleased that more than 40 people from as near as Linnaean Street in Cambridge and as far away as Paris, France, came to the hybrid October 1 launch event for The View From Third Street at the Lincoln Mass. Public Library. Attendees included the daughter of the judge who oversaw the Trial of the Harrisburg Seven; Harrisburg Independent Press (HIP) co-founder Ed Zuckerman and various former HIP staffers; several of my journalism friends, family and friends. Wonderful research librarian Robin Rappaport handled the zoom portion; Marc Kessler and Susan Osgood helped with book sales; Joe Wrinn and Paul Hayre took pictures; friends KBS and others–some from my great writers group The Write Stuff–brought refreshments.
I spoke for about half an hour–folks asked great (tough) questions (like: is this creative nonfiction or a historical fiction? Are you discouraged at the world’s seeming return to times we thought (hoped) we’d never have to live through again? What would you be your advice to a young journalist starting out?). And they graciously laughed at my jokes.
The View From Third Street tells the story of a young journalist’s search for love and truth as she navigates social injustice, a major political trial, and a devastating flood at a tumultuous time of change.
This unconventional memoir draws on the experiences of national journalist Anita M. Harris, who, with college friends, founded a weekly alternative newspaper to cover the Trial of the Harrisburg 7. In that iconic 1972 Pennsylvania trial, nuns and priests stood accused of conspiring to kidnap Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington, DC.
By showing how individuals dealt with the clashing forces of history at an earlier time, Harris hopes to support and inspire a renewed quest for freedom and equality, today.
As a fledgling reporter in the early 1970s, author Anita M. Harris and college friends helped found a small newspaper on Third Street in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Harrisburg Independent Press (AKA “HIP”) was first conceived to report on the Trial of the Harrisburg Seven– in which anti-Vietnam War nuns and priests were accused of conspiring to kidnap Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington, DC,. True story!) Like the many other underground and alternative newspapers of the day, HIP covered civic, consumer, national and international issues–many with parallels in the unrest we are experiencing today.
In this unconventional memoir, Harris traces, from the point of view of Ani, her 23-year-old self, the founding of the newspaper, the trial, and the devastating Flood of 1972, which left 124 people dead. Interwoven, with humor and puzzlement, are stories of Ani’s love relationship, her coverage of poverty and social injustice, and HIP”s reporting on topics ranging from dirty movies to slave labor, heroin sales, racial discrimination; a burgeoning feminist movement, abortion rights and opposition to the Vietnam War.
The book also includes many images and cartoons–giving readers a sense of what it was like to live in those amazing times.
Anita M. Harris is an award-winning journalist, author and communications consultant who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The View From Third Street is available from Amazon and at the Cornell University Store.
The View From Third Street, Harrisburg has launched!
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The View From Third Street
I’m ecstatic to report that my new book, The View From Third Street, is, at long last, available on Amazon. It’s an unconventional memoir of my experiences as a cofounder of a weekly alternative newspaper called the Harrisburg Independent Press (AKA HIP) in conjunction with the 1972 trial of the Harrisburg Seven. Long story, but in that iconic trial, a group of anti-war nuns and priests were among those accused of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington, DC.
The book has three main sections: the first starts with the founding and (often) muckraking reportage of the paper, the second focuses on the trial, and the third ends with a massive flood. It’s all tied together with the personal story of a young woman (moi) named Ani (the first three letters of my first name, conveniently, mean “I” in Hebrew). A member of my writers group urged me to use a different name because Ani is also a breed of “cuckoobird” but what the heck.
Anyway, at this point, I’d like to thank the friends, family members, librarians, historians– and the team at Henrietta’s Cafe in Harvard Square– who helped me research and edit the book–and who put up with me–er, I mean, encouraged me over the years it took me to write it.
I started working on The View From Third Street just as DJT was coming into office–thinking that there might be some parallels between his divisive reign and Nixon’s. Little did I know how tumultuous things would eventually become. I spent several years time-travelling–which was great, during the pandemic. I’d occasionally come up for air, look around, ask, “Is this still going on?” and head back to the 1970s. Now I seem to be pretty much living in the present, and hoping our nation will get back on track.
In the meantime, I’ll be posting here, writing articles, and letting you know about the book’s progress. And about the next one’s …and about the one after that.
If you’d like to receive email updates, please sign up to the left of this chunk–or email me at anita.m.harris at comcast dot net. Oh, and if you want to buy the book–click here!
–Anita M. Harris
Anita M. Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, Mass. More information about her, her work and her books is available at http://anitamharris.com.
Erev Rosh Hashanah 1986: It was a perfect New England autumn day, with crisp air and the leaves beginning to turn colors.
As my wife and I walked through the Harvard campus on our way to Hillel services, we saw something strange and unexpected. The building we were heading for was surrounded by eight police cars with a policeman standing next to each car.
As we walked up the front steps of the auditorium, we saw eight additional policemen who were amiably chatting among themselves and saying hello as we passed by.
When services began, I expected the rabbi to say something. He didn’t. Perhaps he didn’t need to. A few weeks earlier, Palestinian terrorists had attacked a synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, with machine-gun fire and grenades. Twenty-two worshippers died during Shabbat services.
Istanbul was an ocean away, but Harvard is a high-profile place. Better safe than sorry. At the time, I was not alarmed.
Let’s fast-forward 22 years and across the continent to Stanford University. It’s another beautiful autumn day. My wife and I are walking to High Holiday services across a campus plaza to an auditorium being used by Hillel.
We arrive to find a contingent of four policemen out front. They were not greeting the worshippers. They were not smiling. It was the SWAT team, decked out in body armor and helmets while holding large weapons. As we walked past, they didn’t say hello. They were busy scanning the plaza for possible threats, which fortunately did not arrive.
Sitting inside, I had an unsettled feeling. On the one hand, I felt present at services. Yet I also felt the presence of heavily armed policemen outside the building protecting me while I prayed.
But police cannot not always be on hand, as we have witnessed over the past few years at attacks at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, Chabad in Poway and now Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.
I am grieving, and not just for those who have suffered. I am grieving for myself, for my loss of optimism.
My father and I once had a friendly disagreement about antisemitism. He grew up in a poor family in a rough neighborhood. Antisemitism was a daily experience for him. Jewish boys had to walk home from school in groups for protection against Irish gangs. Bigotry was commonplace and discrimination was everywhere. It was perfectly legal.
I grew up in the suburbs and went to excellent public schools. I have had unlimited opportunities. I understood antisemitism from my father’s stories, not from my actual experience.
So I thought antisemitism was slowly but surely dying out in America. In recent years, national surveys have confirmed that antisemitic attitudes have indeed been declining.
My father was more pessimistic, even though he agreed that things were getting better. In fact, he once told me “no other country has been as good to the Jews as America.” However, he explained that life was good for the Jews in Spain until it wasn’t. Then there was Hitler. In Germany, the pessimists went to America and the optimists went to Auschwitz. Israel was important, because you never know what can happen in the future.
So what is happening now?
After the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue, I consulted with a dear older friend who was a Holocaust survivor.
“Could we be facing a future Kristallnacht?” I asked her.
“Absolutely not. America is a totally different society,” she assured me.
Yet my friend would not move to senior housing on the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life in Palo Alto, which I thought would be a good place for her. She was afraid of living in a Jewish apartment building. It could be a target.
That’s the fear right now. We all know it’s great being Jewish in America, even more so now than in my father’s lifetime. Yet the concern today is about safety when we are together.
I spent 12 years serving on public school boards. My worst fear was losing students to a mass shooting, as I pictured attending their funerals. Our school board received briefings on school safety plans and drills. We supported having a policeman on every high school campus. During my tenure, there were lockdowns, but no one was ever hurt.
That’s the reality of public education today, and parents still send their children to school.
Synagogue boards are now facing the same unenviable task of addressing security, something that was once taken for granted.
Yet no matter how important, building security is not the whole solution.
A few years ago, a scientist friend compared antisemitism to a virus that can go nearly dormant while smoldering in small pockets until it mutates; eventually producing a new epidemic. To him, that analogy explained how anti-Zionism has emerged as the new politically correct antisemitism.
So how do we vaccinate against hate? For starters, we reach out, we don’t hunker down. We plan more interfaith activities, not fewer. We stay involved in our broader communities, we don’t withdraw.
In Texas, Beth Israel’s mission statement proclaims, “We believe in interfaith inclusion and transforming Jewish isolation through engagement, participation and volunteerism.” When the chips were down, the Beth Israel congregation did not feel alone as it witnessed an outpouring of support from all communities of faith in Colleyville.
Safety and security is on everyone’s mind, and therefore on the agenda of every Jewish institution. It will be addressed. Yet, it is also important to remember that this is a time for building connections.
Former Cantabridgian Gordon Lewin is a member of the Coastside Jewish Community, in Northern California. He served on the boards of the Palo Alto School for Jewish Education, Menlo Park City School District and Sequoia Union High School District.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J., The Jewish News of Northern California, which graciously allowed New Cambridge Observer to republish it.
Women Artists Challenge Boundaries of Sculpture and Ceramics at Lacoste Gallery, Concord
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As a longtime admire of the Lucy Lacoste gallery in Concord, MA, I was honored when Lucy asked me to write a press release for the show that opens there tomorrow. What follows is essentially a paid post–which the gallery has expanded on its Website.
In the show, “Articulating Space,” at 25 Main Street, two female artists challenge the boundaries of traditional ceramics and contemporary sculpture.
Both artists, Josephine Burr and Lily Fein, use the centuries-old technique of coiling and pinching clay to build forms, rather than rely on clay slabs or the potters wheel. Yet their work is highly modern—taking unusual shapes, embracing light in new ways, and shifting the expected boundaries of artist, object, viewer and artistic convention. Each artist takes a unique approach, Lacoste explains.
Lily Fein Fein’s work tends to be intuitive and, in this exhibition, figurative, with vessels suggesting or relating to the human body.
Lily Fein, Green Venus, Porcelain, 21hx9.5wx3.5d
Fein explains that while her pieces often evoke bodily forms, she sometimes challenges this metaphor “so that the distinctions between the interior or exterior of the vessel invert, touch, or disappear.
“I encourage the objects to morph and change as I create them, developing a language of improvisation that gives form to a stream-of-consciousness approach to making. I am interested in how a clay form can capture, imply or perpetuate movement… defying the nature of the role we’re taught [that] objects occupy in our world.”
Lily Fein, Vessel, Porcelein 15hx15wx15d
A 2016 graduate of Syracuse University in 2016], Fein has won numerous awards; held residencies in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New York, and Japan; and exhibited in Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Montana, and Washington State. Born in Newton, MA, Fein currently resides in New Orleans.
Josephine Burr Burr, a professor of ceramics at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, raises questions of interiority and objecthood (or: duration/temporality), according to Lucy Lacoste, the gallery owner “Some of her pieces are unusually large for ceramics—and she sometimes punches holes in the clay to allow light—and her own energy—to shine through.”
Volumes, (Basin) 33hx20wx12d
Burr explains that the “language” of clay is “mute and absorbent… a holder of time and of the unnoticed, of the underpinnings of consciousness and of daily life.” In her work, she probes at this “unnoticed space, coaxing the temporary and fleeting quality of experience into visible, tactile form.”
Her sculptures “echo familiar objects but confound their meaning—pinched to hold passing time, shifting light, the fragile uncertainty of being,” she says. “Boundaries are intentionally blurred: between interior and exterior space; between pot and sculpture; between object and drawing.
Makeshift Days Group 3
“While clay as a material speaks of the familiar, the concrete and the immutable,” she says, “it also carries a sense of transition, fragility and porousness.” For Burr, “making becomes an act of tactile listening, attending fully to that fragile terrain at the edge of perception… Balance and trust are essential to this process. It is my hope that the work invites the viewer to recognize and rest in that space.”
Burr’s latest approach embraces and interrogates the boundaries of both two- and three-dimensional work. In her ‘still life’ An alphabet of makeshift days, #2 (winter light)—three small sculptural vessels rest on a shelf, a clay ring set against the wall, behind—Burr invites the viewer to consider the continuity and difference between her own work and the art historical lexicon.
Burr, An alphabet of makeshift days, #2 (winter light) Porcelain, Thermoplastic Clay, Wood / 19h x 36w x 6d
Professor Burr, who lives in Hyde Park, MA, has held residencies and/or exhibited in Massachusetts, Maine, Houston, Philadelphia, New York, Texas, Vermont and Iceland. She is a 2021 nominee for the Boston Foundation’s Brother Thomas Fellowship.
Lacoste is “delighted to share the work of two insightful artists who are making important contributions to the increasingly synergistic worlds of ceramics and sculpture,” she says.
Articulating Space will be open through August 7, 2021. Both Fein and Burr will attend the opening reception on July 10th from 3 – 5 PM, with artists’ remarks at 4 PM.
Articulating Space will transition into an online exhibition on Saturday, July 17th to accommodate gallery renovation.
Cambridge Author Anita Harris Addresses Cornell Reunion Class
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On June 12, I had the privilege of introducing the zoom happy hour for classmates who attended the 51st reunion of my graduating class. I touched on some of the incidents I wrote about in my 2015 book, Ithaca Diaries, which is about our four years 1966-1970. Sometimes, I call the book “Gidget Goes to the Revolution” which, in a way, sums up my college experience. But 51 years later, I thought it would be important to reflect on the past as it relates to the present and future–rather a handful for a 10-minute talk–but I think I managed to do it. Here’s a link to the video; the script, which I did not follow exactly, is inserted below.
Hi, I’m so glad to see everyone here, and especially that we’re all still here after this difficult year. I know that some of us are disappointed not to be in Ithaca—but the good part is that friends from far away can be with us. One such friend said he would join in if I provided free drinks…which I am…in my living room. CHEERS!
51st ANNIVERSARY OF GRADUATION 1970 I’m sure you know that this is the 51st anniversary week of our crazy graduation. With those three walkouts, and the demonstration on stage where Morris Bishop, the distinguished historian and leader of the processional hit someone over the head with the baton he was carrying… Many people think that it was Dave Burack—my gov instructor—who got hit over the head …Burack swears it was his roommate…In any case, the demonstrators got hauled off stage and into a cop car…The bear at the top of the mace got bent and has never been the same—nor, I think, have we.
I remember that really well…which is amazing because people were passing a JOINT when we were standing in the graduation processional…and I was definitely stoned.
I WROTE ABOUT THAT IN MY BOOK, ITHACA DIARIES which is based on the journals I kept as an undergraduate: it starts with me arriving at Cornell freshman year carrying the pink suitcase my uncle leon gave me for my bat mitzvah—goes through draft card burnings, demonstrations against the war, the straight takeover, MY LOVE LIFE, WHAT WAS I THINKING Kent State…and ends on graduation day….when, to my amazement, I even led a demonstration.
I WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT ITHACA DIARIES LAST YEAR, AT OUR FIFTIETH but with the pandemic that really didn’t work out. So this year, Sally and Kathy asked me to introduce the social hour– they told me several times to be brief and to keep in mind that this is supposed to be a HAPPY hour. So I’m not going to reminisce a whole lot…I will just move the story ahead a little, wax a bit historical and philosophical, and then we’ll breakout out the drinks. I mean..join the breakout sessions.
*
SINCE ITHACA DIARIES CAME OUT, I”VE BEEN WORKING ON TWO SEQUELS.
THE FIRST SEQUEL IS ABOUT MY FIRST YEAR OUT OF CORNELL— and I imagine that many of us went through similar experiences. After all the turmoil on campus, and changes in the late sixties, I had no idea what to do with myself. (And of course, I was an English major…need I say more?) But as a fledgling feminist, I wanted to prove that I could do things: that anything a guy could do, I could do, too. I got a bunch of short-term jobs.
WEST VIRGINIA First I got a job with the ILR School that took me traveling around the country to several hospitals,; in West Birginia, I had my first look at coal miners with black lung disease.
I WORKED IN A POLITICAL CAMPAIGN where one of the pols spent his days pretending to read the newspaper while staring at my legs…
THEN I WENT ON A ROAD TRIP cross country with two Brits I didn’t know, whose names I found on a bulletin board. They were both named John John, John, and I drove cross country in a big black buick =–u drive it—and picked up every derelict and druggie, all the way from Miami to San Francisco.
AFTER THAT, I WORKED WITH DISADVANTAGED TEENS IN THE PHILADELPHIA GHETTO…AND FINALLY, I WOUND UP IN HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA.
That’s where the first sequel, which I’m CALLING PHILADELPHIA STORIES ENDS.
HARRISBURG
SO, THEN, THE SEQUEL TO THE SEQUEL: HARRISBURG IT TURNED OUT THAT THREE OF OUR CLASSMATES, ED ZUCKERMAN, FRED SOLOWEY, AND VINCENT BLOCKER, WERE ALSO IN HARRISBURG, EACH FOR HIS OWN REASONS. WE AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE ENDED UP STARTING A NEWSPAPER THERE, IN CONNECTION TO A MAJOR POLITICAL TRIAL— IT WAS THE TRIAL OF THE HARRISBURG 8., WHICH HAD AN INTERESTING CORNELL CONNECTION.
HARRISBURG 8 TRIAL BERRIGAN: You may remember Dan Berrigan the anti war Priest, and poet who was deputy director of Cornell United religious work. Anyway, while Dan Berrigan was in prison, Nixon’s FBI Director J EDGAR HOOVER ACCUSED DANIEL’s brother Philip , who was also in prison, of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington DC. Also accused were former ILR Professor Eqbal Ahmad, and six others—mostly nuns and priests. I’m not kidding, I’m not kidding.
So, Ed, Fred, Vincent and I started a newspaper called the Harrisburg Independent Press—or—HIP- around the trial of the Harrisburg 8. That was how I became a journalist, the paper was amazing.
And, for the last few years I’ve been working on a book on my experiences at HIP.
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I WAS WORKING ON THE CONCLUSION. And I started wondering what the heck am I doing, why am I time traveling, going back into the past all the time?
ONE REASON IS PERSONAL : AS WITH Ithaca diaries, I needed to understand on a personal level, just what had gone down, to get things straight in my head, this was such a formative period, in order to figure out what to do next.
BUT ANOTHER REASON IS HISTORICAL/SOCIETAL.
WHEN I FIRST STARTED WORKING ON THE HARRISBURG BOOK, TRUMP WAS JUST COMING INTO OFFICE, AND I FELT THE COUNTRY WAS DIVIDED, much as it was in the late 60s and early 70s. I thought it might be interesting to draw some parallels between the present day divisiveness along the lines of race, poverty, ethnicity, and corruption… and what was going on back then, under the Nixon administration, with race relations, the Vietnam War, dirty tricks and such.
SPIRALS: BROKEN PATTERNS: Then I thought about my first book, it’s called Broken patterns, and it’s about our generation of professional women in relation to our own mothers and grandmothers. It describes a spiral pattern in history—a spiral pattern that I think holds true for Individuals as well.
WHAT DO I MEANBY SPIRALS? HERE I’d LIKE TO PONTIFICATE, A BIT, IF YOU WILL INDULGE ME…
Many of us—myself included—tend to think about progress in a linear way. That is, that to progress, we move forward in a straightforward path toward a goal. But the older I get, the more I see that life sort of emerges in a series of starts and stops—that we get just so far, in moving toward a goal—maybe we reach it; maybe we get blocked… and then, as a society or as individuals, we tend to pull back to reassess, to reintegrate our own pasts, our country’s past, in order to move forward, once again.
TODAY A TURNING POINT IN A SPIRAL I think that now as a society we’re at a turning point in a spiral that’s kind of similar to where we were. 50 years ago. Now, as then, society is divided. Many have moved toward equality but others have been left behind. As you know, there are issues of race, poverty, war, environment, how government should work, what kind of nation we want to be. BUT despite all of the disruptions, the divisiveness, the protests, the violence, I feel heartened that many of us are looking back historically, to understand how we got to this place so that we can regroup to find new ways of doing things. I know that I’m painting with a rather broad brush—but I believe that==or I HOPE that– retreating a bit to reassess, will allow us move forward as individuals, and as a society, once again. END PONTIFICATION
COMING TOGETHER FOR OUR 51st In the same way, coming together for our 50th, or 51st reunion, gives us the chance to look back, to heal, to understand, to figure out where we’re at in order to find new ways to move forward in our own lives. I’m hoping that in our social… er happy hour, we’ll have a chance to catch up, figure out where we’ve been, where we are now, and what adventures come next as we enter this new phase in our lives. TOAST WITH GLASS
One quick reminder—please use chat to catch up/share info or addresses with anyone you want to stay in touch with after the social.
A Harvest of Earthly and Spiritual Beauty at Lacoste Ceramics Gallery, Concord, MA.
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As someone involved in art, science and nature, I particularly enjoyed the current show at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, in Concord, Mass. It features the ceramic sculptures of Ashwini Bhat, whose work embodies her experiences as a classical Indian dancer, a painter, a writer, and a gardener. The show, “”What I Touch Touches Me,” is a visual and tactile representation of her California garden as she–and the garden–progressed through the pandemic. The result is a beautiful harvest of earthly and spiritual objects and ideas.
As Bhat explains: The structure of my new body of work is derived from my immersion in my surroundings in a dramatic, highly various, and fragile Northern California landscape. The sculptures are assembled in four segments: Comfort Objects, Animated Objects, Intimate Earth Objects, and Assemblage Objects.
Animated Object #4, below, brings to mind (for me) a leaf in the wind, a deeply colored Indian veil or scarf, and the graceful hand of dancer. ,
Animated Object #4
Comfort Objects evolved— during a pandemic in which touch has become unsafe— from Bhat’s examination of the shapes and forms of seed-pods “as symbols of mysterious, life-birthing potentialities.”
Comfort Object
Comfort object
“Animated Objects are studies in gesture, movement, and the feelings evoked by[her} memories of objects that have deep personal associations for her.”
“Intimate Earth Objects” reference elements of earth and body. T” hese biomorphic forms enact the co-existence and mutuality of the human and non-human. And they also focus on the sorts of objects that are historically or culturally associated with rituals and sacrality. “
“Assemblage Objects juxtapose colors and consortiums of form that reference particular landscapes in which Bhat has spent time, she writes.
“All four segments are linked by allusions to primordial symbols or patterns such as the Mandala, Spiral, Serpent, the Ouroboros, and the Fibonacci sequence.
“But the meanings of these sculptures are fluid, not rigid,” Bhat explains. The objects might easily cross over and fit into other groupings. And this boundary-less-ness allows them to acquire multiple connotations. There is an open interplay of elements and a possibility of infinitely reassembling alliances. ” Bhat’s aim is”to suggest ways of looking that promote raveled and linked engagements that define the relation between all animate and inanimate matter.”
Also included in the show are several of Bhat’s watercolors….
and a piece from a previous exhibit, “Empowering Voices.”
Anita Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.
Take me out to the [post covid shot] ball game!
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I’m totally pleased to report that I’ve received my second covid shot–Pfizer, at Fenway Park–and, despite a very sore arm, I want to offer thanks and kudos to CIC-health for a well-run and pleasant experience.
As I’ve written in the past, I spent 10 years as a client at CIC Cambridge, which offers shared office space to many startups in an environment that is uplifting, educational and supportive. I found the same at Fenway, which, I am embarrassed to admit, I had, before this week, visited only once in all the years I’ve lived in Cambridge.
I was able to park for free in a space with no meter across from Entrance A, on Jersey Street; someone called out on a loudspeaker not to come to the entrance until 15 minutes before the appointment time. So I waited for a few minutes, then showed my email confirmation to a pleasant fellow managing the door.
Inside, I picked up a new mask to replace my own, answered a few questions about my health status, and then got in line.
.While waiting, I took photos–which an assistant said was fine, as long as I didn’t show any faces. I found the covid advice amidst the ads for hotdogs and such amusing; likewise, red sox on the signs.
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Within ten minutes, I reached the front of the line and was directed to a desk where, it turned out, shifts were changing and a tech was advising another administrator, a doctor, how to work the computer system.
While waiting, I snappped photos of techs filling syringes at a station where spectators ordinarily buy beer.
Then, after asking a few questions and confirming my ID, the doc gave me the shot (it stung a bit) and told me he was glad I had come. I said I was, too, and also that HE had.
Next –into a waiting area.
After hanging out for the required 15 minutes, I got a few more shots (haha) and resolved to come back for better ones on a nicer day.
Heading back to Cambridge, I gave silent thanks to CIC and the team that had made what might have been a nerve wracking experience into a rather pleasant way to spend an hour or less. I’m greatful to be moving into what I hope will soon be a post-covid,”Go Sox ” world. Who knows–maybe I’ll even get to a game!
Anita M. Harris is a writer and communications consultant based on Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.
