Welcome to the greatest place on earth. It’s probably smaller, colder, and meaner than wherever you came from. Still, you couldn’t have picked a better city to spend law school, or perhaps a lifetime.
Boston is many things; welcoming is not one of them. Our winters are cold, our people, even colder, and our insular culture can send you packing before you even hear someone say “wicked”.
Luckily for you, the prima facie case for being accepted as a “Bostonian” is as follows:
- Born in Boston
Or
- Earned a third-level educational degree in Boston
You’re well on your way.
But before Matt Damon anoints you as a Bostonian in Faneuil Hall after graduation (common practice for law graduates; invite your family; it’s a great ceremony), we have to go over the basics.
In this series, I’ll walk through why Bostonians are the way that we are, one pillar of our culture at a time. If you’re looking for an accent lesson or a bar recommendation, you’ve come to the wrong place. Here, we’re getting at the deeper stuff: the very marrow of our culture. Hopefully it will help you make sense of this place, and you never know, it may come in handy when you get stuck in an elevator with a partner at your dream firm, and he starts making small talk about the Sox.
We’re starting with perhaps the most primitive and foundational pillar of Boston culture: Weather.
Weather
It’s difficult to overstate the influence of weather on Boston’s culture. I suppose that’s true of anywhere. The salient principle you must take away is that Boston is a profoundly seasonal place. Our entire essence changes with the seasons. Our behavior, our interests, and our attitude are all tethered to the time of year. To ask a Bostonian “what is Boston like” is akin to asking a lawyer “is this legal?” The answer is always: it depends.
Autumn:
Fall captures a fundamental principle of the Boston identity: all good things must come to an end, but their demise can bring great beauty. Not every day can be warm. Sometimes the sun won’t shine. Perhaps you’re going through a breakup, a family issue, or worse… a Patriots primetime loss. In Boston, we’ve learned that these times of transition don’t have to be dark; in fact, they can be quite colorful.
Many will tell you that Autumn is the best time to come to Boston. I am many. Arriving in Boston in the fall is to find the city just as the city finds itself again.
Downtown high-rises refill with executives returning from the Cape, restoring the city’s buzzing commerce. Universities reflood with thousands of students, bringing with them Boston’s canon intellectual rigor. Football returns to our living room on Sunday, reminding us how much better we are than everyone else, and how important it is to prove it.
For an incoming law student from out of town, fall is a great time to start getting to know your way around, because for most of us, we’re still getting back to being ourselves. Yes, it’s getting colder, but that’s what brings us all back together again.
I have often observed that folks who come here from warmer climates tend to feel anxious about the fall. They see it as a signal of bad things to come. The Bostonian knows that there is always darkness in the distance, somewhere, sometime. If you worry over it, you let it cast a far larger shadow than it’s earned. Stop and admire the colors.
Winter:
And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Probably not enough to prepare you for the arduousness of a Boston winter. Make no mistake, Bostonians are the last people to glamorize this season. The closest you might get is: “this place sucks, but I’m never leaving.”
Strangely, though, our worst season is what defines us most.
Consider this hypo:
You’re walking down Newbury Street on a mid-July afternoon. You’ve got your sunglasses on, linen shirt unbuttoned, with nothing on your mind but where you’re going tonight, what you’re drinking, and who’s gonna be there.
Now consider that same walk on an early February evening. Your hands clenched in fists in your pocket, a scarf cinched around your neck, your eyes nearly brought to tears by the scorching winter wind. What else is a person to consider in such a circumstance but… are these the men with whom I am to defend America?
We have nights like these to thank for Boston’s long Wikipedia page of great writers, thinkers, scientists, and politicians. Would JFK have come up with “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” if he had written it in July instead of January? I don’t think so. Greatness comes from the freezer.
Left to thaw in the sun too long, the mind becomes lethargic, lazy, and undisciplined. Don’t get me wrong, that thaw is quite welcome when the time comes, but we’ve gotta earn it. With such temperatures, such wind, such darkness, comes grit. So too comes wisdom. Winter forces us to look inward; Boston hardly looks elsewhere.
The value of a Boston winter is best described in a poem by Robert Browning Hamilton:
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow;
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.
Spring:
So you’ve successfully embraced the richness of fall, gotten to know yourself a little too well in the winter, and you’re finally ready for the payoff. Too bad. You won’t find it here.
Most would blame winter for the Bostonians’ cold, bitter shell. That shell is only cast in the winter; it’s hardened in the first six weeks of spring, when three months of cold and clear turns into cold and wet. Inevitably, we all convince ourselves in November that we just have to make it to March. No greater lie has ever been told.
The first half of spring is like your professor keeping you ten minutes after class on a Friday afternoon. If you meet a particularly mean and jaded Bostonian, odds are he’s been through one too many wet springs.
But Boston springs teach us not to confuse a setback for a permanent condition. Life doesn’t always happen on schedule; neither does the first 60-degree day of the year. Sometimes it’s in March, sometimes it’s in late April. Spend enough springs in Boston and you’ll have the patience of a saint with the mouth of a sailor.
And then comes that one early morning you walk out your front door and get that first whiff of fresh rainfall as the sun starts to come out. Suddenly, you think to yourself, maybe this place isn’t so bad.
Summer:
Congratulations. You have passed the test and earned your reward. Summer in Boston is unabashedly spectacular. Mainsails rise on the Charles, umbrellas bloom on rooftop bars, and the city relaxes into a tempered doze. This season is what keeps Bostonians from becoming completely insufferable.
This is still Boston we’re talking about, though, so we can’t let ourselves enjoy anything too much. The T is a pressure cooker, the Mass Pike is a parking lot, and the city is full of tourists. This is yet another principle of our culture: don’t get too high on the highs, don’t get too low on the lows.
Look closely, and you’ll find summer’s influence on Boston’s deeply prideful sense of legacy. Everybody from Boston has a place in the summer they like to go, and it’s often a place they’ve been going their entire lives. For some, it’s the public beach down the road; for others, their grandfather’s seaside cottage. Travel with a Bostonian to their summer spot, and you’re likely to be regaled with stories of childhood from this place. You may even learn that their parents spent their summers here too, and their parents before them. Even Bostonians who have moved away from Boston will likely find themselves returning to their summer place when the weather gets warm.
This season reminds us that, no matter where life may take us, there’s always a home for us here.
But traditions don’t just spawn out of nowhere. Someone, somewhere along the way, has to start them. It could be a young boy who walks from his Chelsea triple decker to Revere Beach, or a young lawyer from out of town who cashes in her big law signing bonus to invest in a summer cottage. Whether you plan to spend law school, or a lifetime in our city, we hope you can make a home here too. Who knows, someday your kids may thank you for it.
Devin Martin is a first-year student at BC Law, proud Bostonian, and brand new Impact blogger. Contact him at martids@bc.edu.
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