Hyde Park in Winter

December, 2021

The house where I grew up was on a hill, so my first vivid impression of Hyde Park was the view from the second floor. Depending on the window, we could see as far as the Blue Hills, West Roxbury, or Dedham. Sometimes the view was even better at night. Instead of buildings or land formations, there was just a dark background with a scattering of house lights and streetlights, almost an extension of a night sky. I knew the lights were just lights, but a view through a window frame looked more artificial, or even spectacular.

During our first years in the house, one wall of my bedroom was hung with a map of the world, which I got when was 6 years old by mailing in part of a cereal box. Surrounding the map itself, there was space for columns of tin flags from every country on the planet. I learned to associate the flags and names of capital cities with places on the map — patches of land with the assorted colors of Necco wafers. From here, it was only a short step to thinking of a view from the window as another map, to be filled in with names and boundary lines, or even extended. A map promised exactness and permanence, but it sharpened the appetite for change.

The Hyde Park I knew best was made up of friends and relatives, a church, a school building, and a food store where I worked part-time while in high school. There was also a hangout where I got together with friends, a stone wall in front of a house on River Street, between Junior’s Automotive and a storefront I knew as Sal’s Bakery. We stopped meeting at “The Wall” before reaching our mid-twenties, but the term would stick with us for more than four decades. “The Wall” wasn’t a location as much as something to sit on, and we used it that way for what now seems only a short time. After that, the name mainly describes an inside world, not to be confused with parts of the outer world such as Cleary Square, Readville, Fairmount, Sunnyside, and the rest of Hyde Park.

By the time we stopped using The Wall, we had already started moving to other places, whether to a three-decker in Dorchester, an apartment with housemates in a suburb, or even other states. For a few more years, we saw each other fairly often, or were glad to see friends back for a short visit from somewhere far away. In all this time there was little talk of missing the neighborhood, nor was there much said about the changes and tensions that came with school desegregation and demographic shifts. Most of those developments happened after we finished grade twelve, and only a few of us went to public high schools with open admission. Because problems were worse or more dramatic in some other parts of the city, it was easier to assume Hyde Park was a place where time, without really stopping, moved less noticeably.

After the days at the Wall, I usually went to Hyde Park only in connection with my work, or for occasions organized by someone else. At places familiar to me from before, I was less struck by any semblance of the past than by how things had changed, One exception was a get-together with Wall friends (one visiting from Florida) more than fifteen years ago at a place called Cavan House, possibly the first time I was there. The only beer they served was either Budweiser or Miller Lite, which no one drank from a glass, and the best thing I could say about the surroundings was that they allowed us, as a group, to be anonymous. Though it was nice to hear a live band playing “Stormy Monday,” and to be with friends I would have been just as happy to see elsewhere, my most vivid impression was of the abandoned shopping cart slumped outside near the entrance. Instead of feeling the slightest trace of being at home, I was wondering how someone on the downslope of middle age turns up at a biker bar on Hyde Park Avenue.

For about fifteen years after the Wall days, I did go back to Hyde Park on a regular basis for haircuts, at a place near Cleary Square called the “Modern Barber Shop.” There were two barbers — Joe and Werner, neither of whom had really wanted to spend most of his life cutting hair. During the Great Depression, Joe was advised that hair kept growing and would always have to be cut by a barber. Werner had lived in Nazi Germany, where he said he was assigned to cut hair since he was deemed unfit for other kinds of work. According friends who were fellow customers, Werner had served with in the war, maybe with no enthusiasm, as a young German conscript who would be captured by Americans in the Battle of the Bulge.

Contrary to its name, the shop seemed stuck in a time warp somewhere between the end of World War II and the advent of television. The radio was always tuned to an AM station with a wheezy signal that mainly played big band hits or news and commentary by Paul Harvey. There was a high ceiling, but the floor space was narrow, with one row of barber stools and one row of chairs for waiting. Two of the walls had face-to-face mirrors that made the shop seem larger, multiplying the glare of fluorescent lights and flashes of chrome. On the side with chairs, the part of the wall above the mirrors was almost completely covered with calendars that went up to the ceiling — and which had to be hung with the aid of a ladder.

At first, the calendars seemed no more interesting than a random pile of magazines, but Joe and Werner had a way of drawing them into the flow conversation. Since the calendars were mostly travel souvenirs donated by customers, chatter about Cleary Square or familiar notables such as Tom Menino would mix with second-hand impressions of the Vatican City, the Cliffs of Moher, the Great Wall of China, or the chorus line of dancers on a cruise ship who, as Joe marveled, all looked exactly alike.

In a way, the barbers were curators of spectacle, and it was someone’s trip to Italy that must have inspired Joe to bring up Michelangelo’s toil under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Joe didn’t think of himself as an artist or a connoisseur, but he was impressed by work that was so physically taxing. He said the toil was even a little like being a barber, with all those years trying to get the right look while being on your feet, and with your cramped universe revolving around a single adjustable stool. As Michelangelo himself put it, there could be no art without the material — no concetto that wasn’t already in the stone before chiseling, and no finished product without the hand obeying the brain or, presumably, the setting of a workshop.

If I were to leave the barbers a calendar from a trip to Hyde Park, it would have to show a scenic view. Instead of a snapshot of whatever’s in flux, there would be something that doesn’t change very much. For example, the view from the 12th fairway in the George Wright Golf Course nine years ago would have been almost the same as it was forty years earlier, or maybe forty years from now. In a December with snow cover, there would be no increments of golf — just the unbounded space and a few distant figures drawn by the promise a steep hill. They were there to climb and speed down a slope, but that was all made possible by an exempting force of nature. And, sensing that before one more plunge, they might even take in the snow and sky extending for miles and have the feel of a setting — of being in a place.

It could have been the view from the golf course that made me, even as a teenager, take notice of “Hunters in the Snow,” the famous winter painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Returning with their dogs, the hunters have nothing to show for their efforts, so they might even be too tired and discouraged to notice the pig being roasted outside the inn. None of that keeps me from taking in the rest of the painting: the arrangement of bare trees, the energetic strides of skaters in the distance, the climbing, snow-covered terrain, and — cruising above everything else — the outspread wings of a blackbird. Should I focus on the plight of the hunters off to the side? Should I just go with the flow of Bruegel’s composition and savor the magnificent view? Or should I dwell on the disconnect between the mundane and the sublime — the hunters too exhausted to enjoy the scenery versus the surroundings that regard them, if at all, with indifference? And maybe that’s the point of the title: being in the snow, that is, in a place that could just as well be a condition.

If I went to the barbershop in late December or a little after, there would be a kind of winter ritual. When the haircut was finished, I would dismount from the stool and, as one of the regulars — a veritable Hyde Park figure, I would be directed to a dimly lit room at the rear of the shop. That’s where I found a table with a bottle and a stack of clear plastic cups — and just enough space to serve myself without being seen from the street. Swallowing my shot of Chivas Regal, I let the blaze in my throat expire in a soothing afterglow. Recharged and resolved, I dropped the cup in trash bucket and, entering the shop’s cold, fluorescent glare, wished the barbers a happy new year.