A Street Named Wormwood

It is nice to be back in Boston.  Walking around on a sunny day it occurs to me that I never spent much of summer here when I lived here twenty years ago.  I was, like so many of the inhabitants, a student.   And during the summers I headed out of town.  

I would like to take the kids around to all the obligatory Revolutionary War sights.  “You see that?  You see that obelisk?  That’s Bunker Hill.  OK, so at the beginning of the war, the British, they were wearing red, you see, and . . . “ the Bunker Hill Obelisk quickly fades into the rearview as we speed by on the elevated highway.  They are lucky as I’ll be busy with business meetings today.  I acknowledge they know more about Lei Feng, then they do about Paul Revere.  I’m not sure how much of that I’m going to get corrected in the next few days. 

I was also a newlywed in this town.  My wife will more likely be leading the girls on a tour of the seminal places from our early wedded life.  We’ll see how far she gets with this agenda.  “I know.  You told us already.  You used to work here.  When are we going to get to shop?”

After separate lunches we reconvene and take an Uber from Chinatown over to Newbury St.  “What’s it like to drive Uber in Boston?” which seems to be the ice breaker opening line I default to with any Uber driver.  “It’s good!  Everyone is nice.”  Wow.  Boston’s come a long way.  Where have all the Mass-holes gone?  My kids are in heaven shopping for clothes in stores where my wife, my sister-in-law and I are almost certainly the only people over thirty.

There is a bookstore next door which is more my speed.  Here too, oldsters are in short-supply.  I’m reminded again that all my memories of this street are cold, winter memories and that it is rather pleasant to bounce around here in the sun.  The girls are off now to Cambridge for more mommie-daddy memories.  I’ve got to head to a meeting on a street named wormwood. 

I suspected it was.  I looked and now know that wormwood was a medicinal herb.  I hadn’t know it was part of the sage family Artemisa, either of which is a more appealing moniker.  Nothing on line though at a quick glance to confirm if Wormwood St. was the place in town where all the wormwood was baled and sold or precisely why the street was named this way.  Perhaps it was named after the British prison, Wormwood Scrubs.  Arriving there in another Uber I note that it is a rather short little street, across the harbor.