Last fall I drove up to New England to visit my family and also some friends going to school in Boston. After a long drive one Friday afternoon that included getting stuck in New York City traffic for almost an hour and a half, I made it to my cousins’ house in Connecticut for dinner.
The next morning I decided to get up early in order to make it to Boston for lunch with my friends, who were studying at MIT at the time. I got there a bit earlier than anticipated so I decided to go for walk along the river before meeting up with them. It was a beautiful, sunny day and I was enjoying the comfortable fall weather.
My previous experiences with Boston usually took place in the winter, so I had a lot of memories of stepping out of my car and being smacked in the face by air so cold and dry, the moisture in my sinuses immediately felt like they were starting to freeze.
As a Philadelphian, I was used to winters in the great northeastern part of the United States, but January in Massachusetts is something else entirely. A day that called for a flannel shirt and a pea coat back home meant at least two flannel shirts, a pea coat, a thermal undershirt, and one hell of a scarf in Boston once I arrived.
But this particular day in October by the MIT campus was nice. I was wearing a comfortable green and black flannel shirt from J. Crew that I received as a gift for my birthday the winter before, a well-fitting pair of tan corduroys, and a broken in pair of casual brown leather shoes.
It was a nice morning; I thought as I sipped a triple Americano I purchased a half hour earlier from a cute redhead at a coffee shop on the other side of campus. The cell phone in my pocket buzzed indicating a text message. It was my friend Mike letting me know that they would be ready to meet up in about 20 minutes, after they’d return home from the library.
“Ok, cool” I quickly typed back on my Blackberry as I continued to walk over the Harvard Bridge, peering over the side at the water below. I looked ahead and saw a man with a hand cart loaded up with what appeared to be cases of canned pineapple juice.
The man calmly pushed the cart along the sidewalk until he was about midway across the bridge. Then he began casually tossing the cans over the side of the bridge. I stood there a few feet away, watching him throw can after can into the Charles River before he noticed me, saying “Expired juice. No good”.
I slowly nodded my head and sarcastically agreed “Uh huh, makes sense to me” and then realized that the man was actor Bill Murray! Why he was there in Boston that day, throwing canned juice off a bridge, I will never know. I did ask, but the only response he gave me was “No one will ever believe you.”
Waaaaay too much detail in the back story. A sure sign a person is lying is they try to legitimize their story with a lot of detail.
That being said, I love the imagery of Bill Murray tossing cans from a shopping cart off a foot bridge into a river with a New England fall as a back drop.
You’re That Guy who spends 20 minutes telling the joke about why the chicken crossed the road, aren’t you?