I found this picture as I was going through my CD archives. I was driving home with Damian one afternoon last January and we came across this on the eastern edge of Beverly Hills. The apartment building was incinerated. No casualties, thankfully. It was in the paper the next day. (I thought my picture was better.)

Taken at Redondo Beach a week and a half ago. I'm back in real time now.

My men at Peggy's Cove (Nova Scotia) last summer.

And so this travelogue of my weekend in Boston ends as it began, with a ghostly airport image.

On Newbury Street in Boston.

Warning: photographer at work.

This entry title inspired by Photo Friday's current topic: Faith. Isn't that the nature of a wedding, after all?

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At my cousin's wedding.

Did he ever return? No, he never returned and his fate is still unlearned. He will ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston, he's the man who never returned.

My uncle put the song in my head and it's still stuck there.

A spooky T station. (T=MTA=subway)

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Taken in Harvard Square on a sunny summer Sunday.

It's just a glorified foyer, but I've always loved the room. (Yes, we're still in Adams House. At this rate, my single long weekend in Boston will end sometime in December. Hey, come back! I was just kidding. Sheesh.)

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The dining hall was not only empty of people but of tables and chairs too. The room felt at once cavernous and too small to be the site of so many bad-tasting meals with friends and enemies. Then there were the festive occasions: faculty dinners, waltzes, the yearly Christmas dinner complete with whole roast pig with the requisite apple in its mouth (and the ritualized reading from a Winnie the Pooh story). The room fit those times better than the usual scrape of fork and knife scooping mystery meat off cheap stoneware.

I'd forgotten about the griffins. And the stiff, formal portraits. I think (though my memory is not altogether reliable on this) that this one, in the place of honor just inside the entrance, is John Adams himself, Harvard alum and Adams House namesake.

I'm having fun with these. Are you?

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Outside the Gold Coast (see yesterday's pic).

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I was worried that with no students in residence, I wouldn't be able to get into my old college dorm (known in campus parlance as a House). No worries. A cleaning crew was there, preparing for the first day of school.

This part of Adams House is known as the Gold Coast. It was built by the Vanderbilts (in the 1880's? 1920's?) for their children and their children's friends and was later annexed by the school. I always loved the dark wood and marble. Like living inside history.

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Picture a group of undergrads giggling through the snow, dining hall trays tucked under their arms. Picture these little-more-than-children on their bellies sliding down the majestic, so-historic Widener Library steps on tray sleds. Picture wind-reddened cheeks and wind-torn hair. Picture them running up the slippery steps again and again in the dark to do it just one more time.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just Sever Hall, the site of various classes and seminars. The site, basically, of many and sundry doodle pads, though I suppose they've been replaced by Tetris on everyone's laptop computers. That door is a gothic gracenote in an otherwise colonial setting.

The strangest thing was seeing all the tour groups wandering Harvard Yard. Were they there when I was an undergrad? They must have been. Was I so myopically focused on my own little world that I blocked them out or were they so ubiquitous they became part of the scenery? Maybe they were simply more noticeable this time because classes hadn't started yet, the students were still AWOL, the Yard barren of frisbees, sunners, and study groups lolling on the lawn. And so an odd time to visit, the place inhabited mainly by ghosts from my past rather than flesh and blood people.

Well, except for those tour groups.

The first of my trip pictures: in the corridor at the LAX terminal.