The Saturday regimen was brutal, as I mentioned earlier. I was mildly hung over, but gamely stayed in the fight and I had done the readings and contributed in class. The problem my hobby of trying to document this $9,800 investment of the taxpayers. I think I am giving it a game fight on all fronts.

We had two ninety-minute classes following an surprisingly effective one-hour seminar prep headed by our Facilitator, a student selected at random by Mari-Christine and her staff. Beth is an Air Force senior exec who runs all of their training activities across the active force, Guard and Reserve. She wants to simplify her life and has accepted the Air Force Chair at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, VA. She intends to go into gracious retirement after that in a house she bought near Hill AFB in Utah a lot more years ago than we care to remember.

I stumbled back here to the digs with the box lunch and banked it for dinner. I pecked at the computer in a desultory manner for a while and the clock ticked around toward two. I tried to start the readings, but the deadline is so far away that there was no adrenaline. So I said the hell with it, and decided I had pressing personal business ashore.

I hiked back uptown to Harvard Square and descended into the Red Line of the MTA. I had no idea how it worked, and I was impressed. It is one of those blue-collar mass transit systems that is regular and fairly clean and cheap. It was a buck for a token, and a token takes you right downtown. It is only four stops and one river as the crow flies, and I got off at the Park stop.

It isn’t a Park, though, except in the most general of terms. It is Boston Common. There is an elegantly spired church on the corner of Park Street, and yep, the Old Granary graveyard is right there. I cut across the street and up the steps, through the wrought iron gates. There was a little man with a water bottle and plastic-covered plats of the graves of interest. I did all of them, pausing with reverence at the graves of Paul Revere, silversmith and Patriot. At the plinth that marks John Hancock, and saluted the eternal home of irascible Sam Adams, hot-head, brewer and Revolutionary. I spent a special moment for a comrade-in-arms, obscure for a couple centuries. He was the first one shot in the Boston Massacre with five of his brothers in our trade. Crispus Atucks, African-Native-America, Sailor.

I had a bit of a hard time calibrating myself there in the churchyard. This really was the place, the heart of it, human scale. I was going to walk in three hours the heart of the Revolution that shook and Empire to its roots, and changed the course of the history of the world. The readings of organizational effectiveness fell away and the ghosts joined me. I felt Sam with me, and I felt Crispus, though I don’t know if they would have talked then. They lie together now, and they talk through me.

I had lived in this town once, a lot of years ago. Not here, of course, but out the inter-urban railroad line to the gritty fishing town of Beverly, just past Salem and a world away from the yachts of Marblehead. We could sneak into the harbor though, from the sea, and anchor out and pretend we belonged. I worked on boats, a spare pair of hands for little money and only the joy of going to sea under sail. As a reward for hard work we would come downtown in a beat-up old Land Rover, a vehicle so venerable that a year or so later the frame just snapped in half from the prolonged exposure to the corrosion of the salty Boston winter. If the wipers didn’t work, the British makers had provided a hand crank so you could turn them yourself if you needed to. It was that sort of life back then.

Something was guiding my feet. I didn’t need the map. I don’t know if my kin from the Third Regiment of Foot, Pennsylvania, ever got here. But somehow I knew. The Shelter for Homeless Veterans was housed in an impressive building that once must have been a bank. There was a flag out front and a plaque on the wall that said the edifice stood on the spot where young Ben Franklin worked as a printer’s devil. It was appropriate. Kitty-corner was the Old State House, the oldest public building remaining in Boston, so old that the Imperial Lion on the cornice wears the Crown of England, and the gilded Unicorn faces it unafraid.

I stuck my head in to smell it, the smell of old wood and old oil and wax and centuries. I didn’t pay the five bucks and ducked out the side door. I knew where I was going now, my feet knew the way. I walked along to Faneuil Hall. The plaza in front holds a statue of Sam, gesturing as he would, protesting the injustice of the Crown against property. I walked around to the Quincy Market, because that is where we used to go.

The Quincy was originally a three-pronged warehouse complex with Greek palladiums abutting the wharf. They were the next step from Faneuil Hall, as fill moved the harbor outward and allowed the deep draft ocean going ships to pull right up to the Custom House and the factors and the men who made traded the goods that made this continent hum. The Quincy is now a quarter mile or more from the water, left behind by development.

When we came here in the early ’70s- and I am talking about the 1970’s, mind you, it is easy to lose track here. There was a scheme to update the place and make it a tourist attraction. But that was in the future. It was still warehouses and not good ones. The only going concern was a restaurant that had a connection to the Revolution. In its current incarnation, the Durgin-Park restaurant had been catering to watermen and merchants since it opened under that name 1826. It has the same menu today. Diners have included Cal Coolidge and FDR and a few hundred thousand lesser lights like me. But in those days, when the lights were a little dim and this was not a destination in its own right, the waitress would come to the end of our long checker-cloth table and put HER drink down and ask us what the heck we wanted.

It was almost always broiled scrod with heaps of potatoes. And no drinks at the table, except the waitress’s. We had to get those downstairs in the dark wooden bar.

Now of course Durgin-Park is upscale. The tourists flock outside and the place looks like a mall. They have even done that to the Slave Market in Charleston, South Carolina. The ability of our mutable society to bury the nuance of history is legendary. H.L. Menkin was right, you never will go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. But Quincy Market will always have a broken window in one of the warehouse fronts, and a blowsy waitress with an attitude who had served Franklin Roosevelt boiled lobster.

I stopped for a beer- a Sam Adams- and looked out the window at the passing throng. The bartender asked if I wanted to look at the menu and I told him I knew what was on it, unless it had changed since my last visit in 1975. He said no, and he asked if anything else had changed and I said I couldn’t tell. I wasn�t drunk yet. He laughed and I finished my Sam and walked out into the light. My feet took me again someplace I knew. It was under the JFK Expressway. I think we used to park the Land Rover over here someplace, but when I looked up I realized I was walking in front of Paul Revere’s place, the oldest residence left in this old town. I was in the North End, and I walked past Paul’s statue in front of the Old North End Church, where they hung the one-if-by-land, two-if-by-sea signal.

The North End has been Italian for a lot of years, famous in the commercials for Thursday Is Prince Spaghetti Day in the North End. It was the festival of a Saint, and the band was cranking up and the carts were selling Italian sausage and calimari in little paper trays. The Saint herself was done up in a shrine decked with garlands of dollar bills. I walked on to the water toward the Coast Guard Station. I produced my ID card and the civilian guard saluted me, a nice touch. Sam and Crispus and I wanted to see the X-10, a commissioned Navy ship that lives in the old Navy yard across the harbor. It is kind of a special ship. I walked out to the end of the pier where four high-endurance Coast Guard Cutters were berthed.

There was something quite extraordinary there. The Navy was in town. There were seven little gray patrol boats, small ones, but ships of the United States Navy. They were filled with Midshipmen of the Naval Academy on their summer cruise. They were taking the seven patrol craft to Boston and to Newport and then into New York Harbor.

“Hey!” I yelled. “What are you sailors doing on a Coast Guard Base?”

They explained and laughed and were ready to get some liberty ashore. I told them to remember this night, and New York. They didn’t come better than this, maybe one for the ages. One of the young men asked me where to go. I told him. “Try the Durgin-Park. It has been serving a stiff drink to sailors for 150 years! It’s in the Quincy Market, by Faneuil Hall!”

He thanked me and went about ship’s business. I looked out over the decks of the four patrol craft, rafted out from the pier. Midshipmen and sailors swarmed over the decks, doing things sailors have done since time out of mind, thinking as they worked about going ashore. On the hill across the harbor rises the obelisque of the Bunker Hill Memorial, where Washington was forced to pull back from the Brits, but held his ground for the first time against the Imperial Regulars.

Just below the memorial rise the bristling masts of the ship the Navy designates the X-10. It is an unusual ship, one of a kind, though once they were often seen in these waters. The X-10 has other names. The USS Constitution is one of them. I prefer Old Ironsides.