Happy Hump Day OneIn3ers,
My name is Tim Smith, I’ll be occasionally checking in here to give you my take on the city we all love and inhabit. Boston, you may have noticed, whether you’ve been here all your life or you just got here, is at once a small, tight-knit community and a sectioned territory with staunch divisions. It is my goal to spend some time exploring these divisions with you — this feeling of “us vs them”. Some of these are structural and systematic, some of them are imaginary or at least implied, and most can be very easily broken. The point is that, regardless of who the “us” or the “them” is, this is Boston and it’s all of ours.
I was born and raised (and still live) in Dorchester and aside from the four years I was abroad (in New York City), this is where I’ve spent the vast majority of my time. I went to school here, many of my jobs have been here, and most of my friends are here. The term “Dot Rat” is worn as a badge of honor in these parts (especially when it’s worn with the original Hockey Shop screen), but to many it’s used to simply describe the ones that never leave. I’m a third generation Dot Rat and, in many ways, typify the Boston stereotype that you’ll see in movies or hear on Boston.com commercials.
But, at the same time, I get to see an entirely different Boston (at least 5 days a week). I work in what many from where I’m from would call the belly of the enemy: a university. If there was ever a “them” in this equation, it’s college kids. You can’t miss them — they’re loud, there’s thousands of them, and worst of all, they’re not from here. This is a dynamic that I’m sure we’ll delve into later, but for now, I’ll leave it at that because I don’t actually work with students. I do, however, work mainly with outsiders. I work in an office where I am the lone Bostonian (which means my accent gets made fun of regularly) and with a program of AmeriCorps volunteers, who often hail from all over the country, doing service here for a year. This has allowed me to see Boston in an entirely new way. At the very least, it gets me to see parts of Boston that I’ve never seen before — who knew East Boston had more to offer than Santarpio’s and the airport?
Living in both of these universes at the same time has also allowed me to see that this city, and its residents, have so much to offer one another. There are neighborhoods that we are told never to enter or just never bother with that could very well hold your next new favorite spot in Boston. We have history, God knows we have history, but it’s not limited to a painted red line, so don’t be afraid to jump on the Orange or the Silver or the Green Line instead and see how rest of the City lives. The city is also forever evolving (for better or worse), so challenge those notions and check out a new (or old) neighborhood. This is the only way we’ll break the divide.
