Welcome (Home)!

Welcome to The Getting There. This will be a blog of travel stories from daytrips downtown to excursions across the globe. If you have a story you would like to contribute email me currently at Jfarrellmoran@gmail.com but that is subject to change depending how big this gets. This is not about places. Its about people and little epiphanies, anecdotes, adventures on the road. I hope you enjoy. This first post however, to be entirely contradicting to everything I just said, is about coming home.


I don't know how or why it even started. It began as just my imagination running wild with some small observation. But then through whatever small neuroses I have, it became constant. A mere chain link fence with a tarp over it became for me a cause of fear and mild anxiety. Every time I would pass this fence on my way home from the T (Boston's Subway system) the tarp would move with me. I joked to myself that some poor monstrous Cujo of a dog was behind there unfit to be seen by the world. But as this little movement became a constant, I got worried some dog truly was there despite the lack of noise and my peeks around the edges being fruitless. It was because of this I would pass this tiny little area with slightly more spring in my step. Then in my nineteenth year of life, I was given tickets to London as a Birthday present. I visited friends there for a week. It was not as satisfying a trip as I hoped being my first time out of the country on my own. I had a good time but having been especially groomed by my obsession with movies to believe I'd have some coming of age experience. When I returned Stateside one wintry January evening, I had to take the T home having no way to reach my parents. I got off the T and found the ground to be lightly blanketed in a freshly fallen snow. And as I passed this tarp, it stayed still. And ever since then I haven't noticed it move any. In recent years even, it has become translucent to reveal a small but well maintained garden with old stone angel bird feeder. It reminds me of a more realistic version of how Gordie felt at the end of Stand By Me. While I'd not ventured with friends to find myself and a dead body, I'd seen the world as it really is. And while this story comes across as dumb I'm sure to most who will read it (if anyone), I feel like it was some minor milestone of growing up for me and being done with all those childish fears that stick with us longer than we might like to admit.
-J. Moran