Stirrings

I was in Amherst one day this week, and while a few places are open, the downtown district is still pretty dead. That is likely to remain true for as long as the Five College students are gone.

In Northampton however, there are genuine stirrings of life. Every single parking spot on Main Street was occupied yesterday. Of course, that used to be commonplace every day of the week, but I haven't seen that many cars parked downtown in months.

Even Thornes has reopened, including their basement variety store ACME, which has the cheapest batteries in town.

We paused to buy take-out at Pita Pockets, a place with a limited menu but a reputation for excellence. We ate it sitting maskless on the steps of City Hall, and were never bothered by the Health Nazis.

Next door, the hipster heaven called Shop Therapy is also open.

Keeping the downtown mice from getting too hip is Sid the Cat, a notorious Main Street favorite who lives in Shop Therapy but was confined to his mice hunting duties during the lockdown.

Now he is free to emerge to greet his fans in person.

Even the legendary Haymarket has reopened.

However, like all coffee houses and restaurants, there is nowhere to sit down, although that may be changing in just a matter of days.

It will still be difficult for Hamp and the other Valley downtowns to make a full comeback until all those useless anti-social distancing rules are abandoned, but for the time being, we can all rejoice that overall things are looking up and headed in the right direction.

I once had a friend who tried to commit suicide by jumping off the Calvin Coolidge bridge into the swirling water below. However, he discovered that once he hurled himself off the bridge and sank beneath the water below, all he did was come bobbing up to the surface totally unharmed. He swam to shore, where he realized that he really didn't want to die after all and is alive and well to this day. This 2007 video shows that the Coolidge bridge is indeed a poor site for a death trip.



Were you one of the Bloomsday revelers this week celebrating the life of the controversial Irish writer James Joyce? Here's Grace Slick's ode to Ulysses. Personally I believe H.L. Mencken was right when he claimed that Joyce wrote the book as a hoax, but I don't blame Joyce for that - I blame the critics who fell for it and the sadistic English professors who foisted it upon their students.