All Roads Lead to Framingham

My childhood was filled with what Joni Mitchell called the “hissing of summer lawns:” playing tag across sprawling yards, hot summer afternoons selling cold lemonade for ten cents a cup, roller skating on endless broken up sidewalks. Growing up in upstate New York, I thought the world was one big suburb right up until the day our third grade class took a field trip to Boston and the Science Museum. Besides the thrill of being able to wear culottes – risqué in 1965 – was the enchantment of riding a bus with tinted glass on what seemed like an endless journey past town after mysterious town, ultimately entering the exotica of Massachusetts, pilgrim hat and all. I remember seeing the exit sign for Framingham and thinking: this must be where frames come from.

Then Boston and the Science Museum stole my heart.

My early college years at UMass Amherst were spent blowing off classes to visit the first love of my life in Boston. It felt like half my existence was spent on a bus lumbering along the pike and finally passing through Framingham, seemingly the gateway to a weekend of bliss, as well as the sad harbinger of the return trip on Sunday nights. I still thought it was where they made frames.

          During my sophomore slump (and breakup from above affair) I went to Paris, the city of my dreams. No plans on how long I would stay, because I went there really believing I would somehow “find myself.” After many months of searching, however, I was unsuccessful in locating myself anywhere. I remember standing near the lit-up Eiffel Tower at night and someone nearby remarking that you could see it from space. Still, with all that beauty around me I felt at sea, laid low with expat blues and finally made the move back to the states and to Boston.

          At which point my mother called and said: what about Framingham? It looks like a nice town. (She’d never set foot there.) The crime rate is very low compared to Boston, she added. I pointed out that I didn’t have a car. Besides, I sniffed, that’s suburbia and I’m above all that. I’D BEEN TO PARIS, she seemed to forget.

Many years later, when my father was very ill and I drove to upstate New York each weekend to take care of him, the Framingham sign was a gateway to what I knew I had to face each weekend, (as wonderful as it was seeing him,) as well as a welcome sight to my bleary eyes as I crawled back to my studio apartment in Cambridge on Sunday nights.

Then I met the man who would become my husband, who lived in Needham at the time. Even though I had a car by then, I scoffed at the idea of living “in the middle of nowhere.” You mean, you have to drive to a bar? The grocery store? Starbucks? Unthinkable. I’d visit him in the “boonies,” then return to my noisy, roommate-filled trashpit in Allston. After a few months, even I had to admit it wasn’t so bad out there in the ‘burbs: it was quiet, in fact it seemed…actually…peaceful. I found I was almost able to think.

We got married and decided to sell the Needham house. Too crazy expensive to keep. We looked around: North shore, South shore, even considered Western Mass. Finally he said: what about Framingham? We can afford it, and it’s commutable for both of us.

I gasped. Shuddered. Maybe there are places more unlike Paris but none jumped to mind. Framingham seemed so pedestrian, so unglamorous, so filled with compromise…so… realistic. Something I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

It will be our twelfth year here, living in the town that was my mother’s obsession thirty years ago. I learned that Framingham has nothing to do with frames. So, what is Framingham? The largest town in New England, for one thing. There are cows, Brazilian bakeries, our house, Nobscot, slab ranches, the Chicken Bone, a train, Saxonville, the Sudbury River, the Danforth Museum, Shoppers World. I have love here, friends, work. I’m just as much here as I ever was on the Champs Elysees, the Louvre, walking along the Seine. Opportunities for joy are here as anywhere, if you know where and how to look. And when it’s all lit up at night, I bet you can see Framingham from space, just like the Eiffel tower.