The Union Oyster House

I spent most of Sunday afternoon patiently waiting at toll plaza backups on I-95 coming back south from Maine. I go in right around cocktail hour, returned the vehicle undamaged and was on foot again. I asked my room-mate if he wanted to pencil in a trip downtown before we left, to visit the venerable Union Oyster House on Wednesday, our last free night here. There was a minor altercation in front of the Condominium where we are billeted. People were hungry, and Jill and Vladmir and Don decided that Wednesday was too late. We accelerated the program since we are running out of time here at Harvard. Four days and a wake up and we are gone, dispersed to the aluminum sky and the four corners of the world.

The group decided the Union could not wait. Soon we found ourselves ensconced in Loren’s gigantic Navigator SUV and flying downtown on the Stoffard Highway.

We found a place to park on Milk Street and wandered a couple blocks over to the late weekend crowd at the Quincy Market. There was still a fairly big crowd on the street, and I took the group up the secret backstairs at the Durgin-Park to show them the checked tablecloths were President’s used to dine, and where surly waitresses told YOU what you wanted to eat. But this place was not the objective. The Durgin-Park claims to be an old restaurant, with allusions to antecedents in the mid-18th Century. The Union Oyster House was established in 1826 and the Management claims it is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in America.

There may be a Mexican restaurant in El Paso or Santa Fe that would dispute that, but there you have it. The Union is located in a dark brick three-story building adjacent to Faneuil Hall and the Quincy Market. It has an odd, lopsided appearance to the front and the building has been here a lot longer than 1826, but it was a ladies clothing emporium. Briefly it had been the place they published the seditious broadside The New England Spy, and was the office of Washington’s paymaster before the Battle of Bunker Hill.

It was been dispensing shucked oysters and a variety of traditional New England dishes since before the Jackson Administration, and accordingly an ideal place to talk politics. It was one of those nights. There was a crowd around the shucking-bar but I got to the hostess and a table for five was available immediately upstairs. We walked up the stairs and through the dark wood of the original dining room and through the warren of extensions that have been added over the years.

I had a dozen bluepoint oysters. It was the right thing to do. Daniel Webster, the noted man of legislation and letters reportedly used to come in to the Union and take a place at the circular bar where they shuck the oysters. He would have a tumbler of rum and a plate of oysters and it was not unusual for him to pile up six plates and six glasses at lunch. They made Great Americans tougher in those days.

JFK had a favorite booth upstairs in front of what is now a service bar. They have a little plaque to signify that the future President used to slurp oysters there. The toothpick was invented here, too. It’s true. You can look it up. I have a tee-shirt that proves it.

  Subj:      Re: Week Two

  Date:     Mon, 12 Aug 2002 6:30:13 PM Eastern Standard Time

  From:    VicSocotra

  To:        Moo

Moo, I have the reading for Macro Econ tomorrow at my elbow. As you can see, I am typing on this instead of hi-lighting salient points.

I have admired the progress on the home improvement front. I particularly liked the part of having to will yourself to remember to remove the contacts. The reason I never tried them is that vanity could not overcome my inborn tendency to find likely chairs a final resting point, a habit which, as I understand it, would leave plastic glued to my corneas.

Glasses are much easier. I just sit on them. I didn’t include it in “Where’s Waldo” but I periodically forget that I wear them. One blurry visage is as good as another on rising, and for nearly 40 years I could see like an eagle. I carefully crept across the creaky floor boards to the stairs, and edged down the side to minimize the noise. It wasn’t till I got down that I realized my glasses were still next to the bed. I couldn’t go back up to get them without making a racket, and had to do things like guess at how hot I had the stove turned on for the percolator. My vision went suddenly, at around 44. It is not the first thing to go, but I forget what that is.

Actually, it wasn’t, but that is the story of the mid-life, isn’t it? Not everything wears out at the same time.

Here is the part of Waldo I didn’t include in the story, since I sent it to my hosts, and did not want to offend:

“I liked the living of it. Another one of those 30-hour adventures in the way I live my life.

My buddy George has not changed much. He was voted most handsome in our high school class. He was a guileless lad, oh, perhaps the low cunning we all had, but with George what you saw is what you get. He is still a gifted athlete, though a broken leg a few years back makes his stride a bit of a lope. He has a powerful torso with a bit of a barrel to the gut now, but still narrow hips, narrow and powerful as when he swung the bat for the Maples baseball team. He was good enough to get a try out for A-level industrial league ball.

George is smart but has absolutely no ambition. He still reads, is still aware and engaged with the wider world. It just doesn’t mean much to him. He is content with what he has found. Judy is an attorney. She is tough and motivated and she is the breadwinner. George is an excellent father to Annie, a lithe young woman of twelve, graceful as a colt. Little Frazier, six, is slight and fair and a little shy. He has been told that he should read like all the others and so I saw him puzzling through the Sunday Funnies, trying hard to associate the pictures with the words.

The Grandparents are near, and they dote on their son and their grandchildren and they all live in Bath, one of America’s Great Small Towns for quality of life. George will take care of the surgery for his Dad�s growing aneurysm. It will require chest-cracking surgery and some duct tape to repair, but it is not an immediate crisis. Win or lose, this is a family. And it is partly mine, since I lived with them for a couple years.

Our relationship? Good and solid. I provided a cover for him so he could smoke and blame it on me. We have always been co-conspirators, and we are still. One of my other buddies, part of the posse of old, is not on speaking terms with Judy, and he is unwelcome at Bayside. She likes me, she thinks, though she scarcely knows me well enough. If I were to become a summer person, and got my hours adjusted so that I could carouse until two AM, that could change. She seemed moderately impressed that I had the coffee on when she came down to begin her day.

Judy provided the structure and the means for George to be George. His thick brown hair has waves of silver at the temple, and it is still wild from the salt baths he takes twice a day in the icy waters.

Left to his own devices, he would still be drinking hard likker and getting in trouble. But Judy has pretty much cleaned up that side, and George is responsible when it comes to the kids.

With us, that is a different issue. When the Association  Meeting started at 1030 Judy marched off and took a thick sheaf of folders with her. She is the Counsel, a pro bono job to protect the summer people from the locals. George and I walked down to the docks. I took a couple shots of the little gingerbread houses. George was ready to jump in the ocean and I was ready to jump onto the highways. The lifeguard seemed surprised to see two old guys embrace, one brown as a nut and the other with that Washington pallor.

Relationship? Closer than a lot of lovers I know. As comfortable as an old shoe and at times as though thirty years had passed like the blink of an eye. I envy his independence and he is moderately interested in what I have done. He is neither overly impressed nor envious, and I admire the fact that he has lived his life exactly as he wanted.

When we go in the ground, I hope that we are equally pleased. But I think I want to have a place like George’s, and he has actually lived in it all these years…

Anyhow, Maine was unreal. I have a brochure about places to rent in the village next summer.

I am thrilled to be coming home. It was too long, though a good thing and a worthy expenditure of the taxpayer’s treasure. One of the final exercises is a re-enactment of a labor dispute in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “Graduation” on Friday morning and then, praise Jesus, I am back. I am supposed to take my son Nick up to Ann Arbor to start his sophomore year a week from Saturday, and have promised my folks to go up to the old homestead for a few days. I had two weeks leave scheduled, but taken with Harvard’s three week absence, that strikes me as a bit cavalier on the job front.

Of course, maybe it is time.

More soon. I need to read The Economic Report of the President, Transmitted to the Congress February 2002. Maybe hi-lighting will substitute for understanding.

Vic