peter martin

East Cambridge isn’t where I live, but it is where I spend most nice days…after biking down from Arlington, I’m usually at the window table I’m sitting at right now, drinking coffee and building websites out of Mike Fiore’s coffeeshop, RJ Gourmet Coffeehouse. After yesterday’s forced (and painful, it was 75 degrees out) lockdown and general craziness, here’s my report from this corner of the world, a neighborhood with a mix of hipsters, working class immigrants, and the occasional itchy junky….a neighborhood that often feels more familiar to this Lowell guy than the (lovely) town that I live in now.

Things are pretty much exactly the same as they were on. That night, I biked by Norfolk street, which was on the news all day yesterday, at about 6pm on a nice day, and the streets were busy, bars were buzzing, and things were normal. Today, I just biked through Inman again on my way down and the sidewalks were busy, the Druid, Bukowksi’s, and Trina’s were all full of laughing faces, Clover had a line out the door for their organic veggie sandwiches, my bike shop mechanic was working on a customer’s ride, and you could hear a half dozen languages chattering about whatever normal petty stuff had taken precedence in their lives again. I heard that junky cackle from a third floor window and laughed a little about how much more stressful yesterday was for an addict separated from his stash. 

Nobody seemed to be paying attention to Norfolk street at all, except one flustered cameraman who tried to set up in the bike lane and was successively bumped by about a half dozen of us passing cyclists as the light changed.

I’m sure there will be a million questions from here on out, and more wrinkles as we learn more about the survivor, a 19 year old charismatic pothead and intelligent student athlete who should have THRIVED in this neighborhood. But right now, he’s already being forgotten. It’s a nice day in Cambridge and there are better things to do.