Bidding 'Bye to Bawlmer

I'm blessed on my final day here with a beautiful Bawlmer--it's how locals pronounce the name of this city--sunrise. A peach glow with light yellow fuzz streaks along the horizon and rises up into a marine-blue sky.

The water of the bay outside my window shimmers and shakes lightly as its eastern-most edge fills with light and life. The farther end huddles, still, in the dark shadows of night. At the end closest to me man-made lights--not sunshine--reflect their white columns across the length of the bay already aware that their night of protective illumination will soon be overtaken by dawn.

Oh, this has been a fun--but short--visit with my dear sister and brother. Weather shifted from the 22 inches of snow that preceded our arrival, to two days of rain and fog (yesterday was 48 degrees), to this beautiful clear-skied morning.

Yesterday ... another day of adventure. In the afternoon we visited the National Aquarium, a 15 minute walk from Mel's apartment. We thoroughly enjoyed the 4D theater showing of Polar Express. I suppose that 4D means you experience the movie as if you were in it. Consequently we wore 3D glasses and, at appropriate moments, were sprayed with water, surrounded by floating snowflakes and bubbles, and shaken in our seats as if we, too, were on the train to the North Pole.

We also smelled the hot chocolate that children drank on the train as well as the evergreen smell of the Christmas tree once our child hero returned to his livingroom. Brother Brett even felt the poke of a branch that came straight at us (though Melanie and I, thankfully, missed that experience).

It was fun to see a dolphin show too. It was much too high tech and multi-tasked for my taste (five or six trainers, an audience volunteer plus child volunteers, video screens, environmental messages, and ... dolphins, which is who I truly came to see afterall).

The main aquarium was fabulous, level after level of fish and sea creatures, an area filled with sharks and sting rays, and a wealth of written information. Innumerable children and adults, all of us childlike in our excitement and awe, bumped against each other as we pressed up to glassed displays and hung over bannisters to glimpse an elusive sea creature.

Afterward, we walked back to the pier across from Mel's apartment and stood, each of us under our own umbrella, and looked/listened/sensed the bay as it lay shrouded in fog. Then off ... to dinner at Dockside, a crab place in Canton. Mel and Brett shared a dozen crab--pounding the claws with wooden hammers on a plastic knife--and carefully picking out each tiny, sweet piece of meat. I'd already eaten my Caesar salad and shrimp before the crabs arrived so I watch their mining efforts carefully and was occasionally handed a small piece of flesh for my own edification.

After dinner we drove to a neighborhood about five minutes out of downtown where residents decorate their homes for Christmas. I'm not just talking decorate. I'm talking ... create an entire world of lights, blow-up figures, trains running on tracks, and handmade Christmas trees from hubcaps, bicycles, and tinfoil, forks, and spoons. Fabulous.

One man actually opened his home--the front room at least--to anyone interested in viewing his metal sculpture. He stood inside his open door as people filed through. When we inquired, he admitted that he allows people into his home for 30 days from Thanksgiving to New Year's. Last year, he said, he witnessed more than 27,000 people pass through his gallery.

Ahh, the sun just breached the horizon. Morning has broken, the day is begun....