I started at my current job five years ago. Within the first few months my department had cocktails in the CEO’s condo on Tremont Street overlooking Boston Common. It was winter, but instead of boots I was wearing sneakers, on account of being inside the beautiful apartment of a higher-up. I had the boots with me in my gym bag and planned to put them on when I left. A lot of snow had fallen and it was my custom at the time to walk home to my apartment in Somerville from downtown.
We had gathered in the well-appointed apartment to celebrate the end of a stressful period. The boss invited us to help ourselves to his red wine and scotch, and over ice I poured two fingers of the latter for myself and set off to mingle. When the boss came around to me he asked me what I was drinking and I told him Dewar’s on the rocks. He said, “That’s not a scotch on the rocks,” then took my glass out of my hand and went back to the kitchen.
He emerged with a much bigger glass than the rocks glass, containing an amount of scotch much greater than that which I, in an effort to avoid seeming presumptuous had poured for myself. I didn’t and don’t own rocks glasses that size, but if I did I still wouldn’t fill one up with that much whisky. Not if it was going to someone else. And if that someone was in my home and poured himself a drink like that I’d think he was abusing my generosity.
But things are different if you live in Downtown Crossing, and why wouldn’t they be? In a lovely condominium a stone’s throw from Beacon Hill, a handle of Dewar’s is a drop in the bucket. I gratefully accepted the drink and by the time the evening wound down I’d had a few more like it.
It was late and no snow was falling. It was well below freezing and even with the boots I knew the walk home would be dangerous with all the ice on the ground, so I left my street shoes on and decided to take the train. I got caught up in a book and didn’t notice I had arrived at my stop until the doors were closing. A man trying to catch the train put his arm between the doors and they stayed open long enough for me to get out.
I was up the stairs, out of the station, past the Somerville Theater and three blocks down Holland Street before I realized I had left my gym bag, with my boots in it, under my seat on the train. I walked back to Davis Square and a woman in the tollbooth called ahead to Alewife but they said a sweep of the train hadn’t turned up anything. I wasn’t convinced they’d looked very hard, but by then that train was on the other side of Park Street, so if they had missed it there was no looking for it. Not after passing through downtown again.
That night still makes my colleagues laugh, but if they lived with me today, I don’t think it would.
