Chez Chesler

I suppose there is a lot to like about Lowell, Massachusetts. But I never get to see it. In the fall of 1979, when I had been here only a couple of months, a high school classmate then at MIT and I went to hear Peter Shickele perform works of P.D.Q. Bach at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. We consulted our maps, took the Red Line to the Orange Line to North Station, and took the old Boston & Maine railroad (now the Lowell line of the MBTA commuter rail to Lowell (past the home of the woman I would meet 9 years later and marry, and past the house we would buy 17 years later) and walked to the auditorium. We walked from the station to the auditorium. We left the concert about an hour early in time to catch the last train back to Boston. We got to the station early. The train never came. We never figured out why. We ended sharing a cab with 5 other stranded travellers, $49 to North Station. (Not knowing the city yet, we didn't know where to be asked to be taken other than where the train would have gone.) I probably still have my unused return ticket somewhere. When my wife and I were still DINKs we subscribed to Broadway in Boston or a similar arts program. We bought tickets for the Count Basie Orchestra playing in Lowell, probably also at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Somewhere near Spot Pond on I-93, on our way from Somerville to Lowell, my Cadillac, The Jewel of Denial, threw a freeze plug, lost all its coolant, and overheated. We never made it to the concert. Last weekend I took my kids to LaLacheur Park to see The Lowell Spinners. It's a lovely stadium, admission was only $3.50 (standing room), concessions were cheap, and everybody was friendly, but the game was rained out. I didn't get the contract I was trying for with JP Morgan/Chase at Cross Point Towers (the former Wang Laboratories towers) either. Update, August 27: We finally made it to a game two weeks later, which makes it the first professional baseball I've seen in person since before the 1994 strike. I forgot that I'd taken the rainchecks out of my wallet a few days earlier (on the basis that I'd know if I were going to be headed to a game and could pick them up.) We arrived late, and missed Major Leaguer Keith Foulke's pitching in rehab, and the supply of free T-shirts. Unlike two weeks ago, when they assured me there would be plenty of empty seats if we took standing room, with the nice weather empty seats were hard to find. We lost our first squatter's seats after an inning, with some unnecessarily nasty comments, and stood for the remainder of our time. I found the entertainment between the half-innings, for which the Spinners are somewhat famous, distracting, spoiling the rhythm of watching a game. My kids felt that the half-innings of baseball were distracting from the entertainment, and we left after about three innings. But at least I'd found free street parking.