From a distance of nearly 6,000 miles, Maui seems a dream of sorts, not unlike it did before I moved here more than a decade ago. Returning to the east coast I remember some of the reasons why I moved. In no particular order:

Nosebleeds – the air is so dry here for winter (yes, it’s nearly May but the trees are still bare and the wind still icy off the Boston Harbor) that nasal passages crack. The air wicks moisture away from your skin within minutes. You walk around itching.

Noise – Above ground subway cars, traffic, pneumonic drills, construction, the city is forever repairing itself, growing, changing and all that is a tumultuous enterprise.

Traffic – Yes, it’s terrible that it can take two hours to get from Kahului to Lahaina now. And, to be fair, Boston traffic, for all its noise and numbers, moves more quickly than that. You see, unlike the idiots running Maui (indeed Hawaii) roads, the east coast uses things like sequenced lights to move cars quickly, and traffic triggers that actually work to change lights when appropriate. But what I have never liked here is attitude, something which has yet to bleed to Maui. It’s a toss-up whether Boston drivers more often use their steering wheels or their horns. And here is the home of the statement which summarizes abusive driving at its finest: putting on your turn signal is giving information to the enemy.

There is also a sense of history here that is simply not present on Maui. Sure lots of it is tacky – Paul Revere Transportation is a taxi company. But to walk into the first church in America, where Ralph Waldo Emerson was minister, or to Quincy Market where our Forefathers stood, lends an excitement that is simply missing from piles of stone in Heaus. Sorry, but true.

Like perhaps no other American Place, Boston is sharply divided ethnically. Southie of course is Irish, and even today, in the 21st Century, the Irish rule Boston. They are everywhere, from the civil serivce jobs and bars, to the sporting arenas and construction companies. The North End is Italian, and between North and South, never the twain shall meet, and not clash. West and central is a polyglot, but dominated by blacks and increasingly orientals, particularly Koreans.

They all seem to get along. Unti they don’t. Local papers report on the upward mobility of Koreans, who own many businesses in the poorer neighborhoods, and have made money where Blacks, despite having a decades-long edge, have failed to accomplish. So, Black and Korean gangs frequently fight. Koreans seem abusive to the Blacks, Blacks seem “uppity” to the Koreans.

Still, in a city of such a size, with all its problems, there are signs that perhaps, just maybe, Armageddon is not quite upon us: a skin head, huge, covered in tattoos, and a nose ring, with heavy metal blasting out of earpods, rises and gives his seat to an elderly black woman on the subway, and she gratefully accepts. A woman in line at a coffee shop pays for the customer behind her, without that customer’s knowledge, the owner of a used bookshop gives a book to a teenager who is $2 short, saying “I’m just glad you read, honey.” A boy reads Sophicles to his girlfriend on the bus.

Regardless of location, weather or bent, the one lesson humans have never learned is that in the end, we are each other. Sartre was right – we can be each other’s hell. But Shakespeare was right too. Love will find a way. My mind is invariably with Sartre. Today, in this cold, sunny, weathered town, my heart goes with the Bard.

– Maui Curmudgeon, somewhere in Boston