Month: June 2026

SUMMER AND THE SOLSTICE DESCEND UPON THE LAST MILE

2026. June 21, 8:14. Sunset in 16 minutes. End of the longest day.

The light in The Lounge is soft, the trees outside green and full. Of course, not too many trees on either side of humble three-story building in which The Last Mile Lounge occupies the ground floor. A fellow named Chavez was at a middle table by himself. It was a Sunday night, and I counted eleven patrons. A new kid named Pascal was at the bar. He comes from Lynn. He teaches Seventh Grade over there, fresh out of college. School is out for the year.

“What’s up with the juke box,” one of the nurses asked, standing in front of the OUT OF ORDER sign on an 8×11 sheet of paper taped on the curved Plexiglas front of the vintage Wirlitzer. She’s the one who always likes to play “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion.

“Broken, Pascale called from the bar. “Getting it repaired tomorrow. The guy has to come up from Rhode Island.”

“It’s alright,” said Chavez, looking at the daylight on this, the year’s longest day, dimming slowly outside either side door, both opened for cross -ventilation, because everybody was waiting for the emergency guy to come and fix the air conditioner built into the wall next to the bar.

“It’s alright,” Chavez says again.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” said the nurse.

“Nothing working tonight,” said some guy I’d never seen before, sitting with a guy I’d see in the Mile from time to time named Crowley.

“One thing’s working,” said one of the nurses sitting at the table the other n urse had left on her trip to the juke box. They were all drinking either beer except one and she was drinking a Whiskey Sour. “This one,” said one of the nurses who was drinking a Budweiser from the bottle. She pointed over the table where she with other workers(nurses or nurse’s aides or something like that) fresh off their weekend shift at the East Boston Neighborhood Health Care Center.

“Alright, it’s alright,” said Chavez, insistently. “We are at Stonehenge. (I detected a Hispanic accent now.) We are at Bethlehem at the hour of birth. We are on Everest at sunset. We are here, on our last mile.” He rose, his chair screeching on the wooden floor, and went quickly out the side door, shouting, “I must go to the beach, to the ocean, the open water, see the horizon. I must see the earth lurch away from Mother Sun,”and he disappeared out under the maple trees, his sneakered feet touching the cracked and gradually cooling sidewalk where the day’s heat had settled on a gutter littered with wrappers and flattened plastic bottles, and where it was lingering still.

(I swear I spotted, one day not long ago — and despite the city’s massive street-sweepere trucks having clean up after the annual snow melt — remnants of brown fallen maple leaves mixed in with fresh springtime deposits of debris. It made me sad, for those leaf remnants had been green this time last year, then gold, then fallen unnoticed in the fall. I was noticing them now. And I looked up into the new leaves on those scrawny urban trees, casting their modest degree of shade. It is the stubborn oak leaves that usually linger, not the maples. But they were here now, and good to see, as summer in the city commenced.)

The air conditioner guy pulled up in his white panel truck by the door Chavez had just gone out.

The artist Knox, at his usual place on the usual barstool, sketching on a pad next to his half-drunk Blushing Monk, said without looking up, “He’s four minutes late,” referring to Chavez. ” Sun set at half past.”

The air conditioner guy came in out of the June gloaming with his tool box –and was greeted by a round of applause. He bowed, then he asked, “which one?” (Because the other wall air conditioner by the nurse (as noted) and directly in his line of sight, was working, though rattling a little.

“This one,” Pascale said, pointing to the dead silent wall unit by the side of the bar. “But Joe (he was referring to Joe Barron, the owner, probably at that hour in his home along the ocean in Swampscott), “he’d like you to take a look at that one, too.” Pascale pointed across the room to the rattler sticking out of the wall. Pascale, to demonstrate its inoperative state, picked up the little white remote from udner the bar and gave it a click, raising its temperature, but also its noise, to the amusement of the nurses.

“Geez,” said one of them. “Now I’m going to have to find a sweater,” and she laughed heartily. a sweater on a day when heat stroke and exhaustion were probably the order of business at their workplace.

The nurses, previously chatting among themeselves, one of them in a Red Sox blue cap, resumed their chat, cool now, talking abover the rattle of the old machine on the fortunate side of the room. (Truth was, nobody elsewhere in the room, sitting over their drinks, seemed to be noting the heat much. I had my ice water, after all. )

“I shall be delighted,” said the air conditioner guy in belated response to the request for his skills. He was, so far nameless, but exhibiting all the characteristics of a moonlighting Summer Stock thespian.

Ah! I said inwardly to myself — I who had by chance, but out of habit, come to the Mile for company on this muggy and uncomrotable day (only to find the place stricken with a dysfunctional appliance. ( I didn’t care about the juke box. I swear no one plays that much. This is, much of the time, the Last –and Silent — Mile.

Cool air would return soon to The Mile, but the outer darkness was finally gathering and thickening.

There was a glow. Yes, the gloaming. Pascale had kept the lights dim. He’s an art student. I counted eleven people in the place. I was at the bar in front of a glass of ice water.

8:39 The longest day was, yes, darkening.

Summer was here.

I went out on the front sidestreet, lthen walked to the side, looked and saw no sign of Chavez. The beach was down there. He’d be at the beach, standing in what light was left. Over my head, birds were still twittering among the maple leaves. They would be sleeping soon.

About this Chavez. We don’t see him often at the Mile. Probably a member of Lynn’s modest Chicano community, but a soulful guy –with Stonehenge, Bethlehem and Everest on the mind. Even Public Works people have their private works and reveries. (Yeah, I know he works for the Public Works Department over there. Don’t know what he does for them, exactly.

Behind me, I became aware Pascale flipped on the Mile’s overhead light illiuminating the sign above the door — and the neon Rolling Rock sign in the left front window. It was two colors, perfect additions to the Summer Solstice dusk….

(Red) Rolling

(Green) Rock

Pretty.

Chavez’s draft, half drunk, sat on the table inside.

I think it was a Molson Canadian.

My ice ice water was waiting for me on the bar as well.

FIRST LINES AT THE LAST MILE

There is a book club made up of guys who drink at The Last Mile. They meet off-premises around the corner in the brick apartment block, first floor. I can’t name the guys now — it’s a guy’s group, ladies invited(occaionally a few will go and enjoy it) . And its held in Ronnie Belecavitch’s apartment. It’s the apartment where his Lithuanian parents lived until the day they died. They meet on a Monday night. I stopped by once and heard them talking about From Here to Eternity. It was interesting hearing Sticky Sammartino elaborate on the interaction of war and memory and rememberiing a cousin of his who was at Schofield Barracks when the Japanese attacked.

But I drove by the Mile one night and saw cars parked nearby with bumper stickers that were tributes to the value of poetry. I parked and, very curious, went in the side door, saw Deano at the bar (working a night shift for a change) and he smiled and I went up to the bar and he said this guy Balin came in one night with a bunch of other guys, a rarified, arty kind of group of the kind that occaisonally search out The Mile for its underground reputaiton has a captivatingly obscure dive. No one, including Deano, knows exactly know where they come from — and nobody felt like asking them. They were welcome as the flowers in May, as is anybody who wants to stop by the Mile.

It was also nice seeing fresh blood out at those tables. I didn’t want to scare them off. They all, according to Deano, had ordered some serious drinks and on this night, they were having a ‘first line’ contest. This much I know because I asked.

Deano was, as always (in the tradition of good bartenders) affectingly indifferent and accepting of the newcomers, but telling me, “I don’t know first lines or last lines — or the first thing about poetry except maybe, “roses are red, violets are blue…”

“‘There, that’s a first line,” I said. “Go over and join them. You’d fit right in. It’s a slow night. I’ll mind the bar for you.”

“Thank. And no thanks,” Deano said. Among the absurdities of all I said was the idea that I could run the bar for him.

First Line Contest’,” I mused out loud. “Interesting. You gotta know your poetry to know random first lines.”

No doubt abut that, Deano agreed. Kind of like people who know baseball statistics.

Turns out they come in every Monday night. I guess it kinds of gives a little touch of flavor to the drab start of the week.

“They drink, they spout poetry,” Dean said, “I hear ’em over here. They get louder, like all drinkers, the more they drink. I hope nobody decides somebody’s cheating and starts a brawl.”

We laughed at that. I saw a Boston Herald headline: POETIC PUNCH FEST IN FAMOUS REVERE WATERING HOLE. (By the way, Deano told me somebody was doing some research and found out the Mile is actually partly in East Boston. I’ve got to look into that.)

Somebody sitting near the table came up to the bar with the last remnants of their hamburger and had overheard the ground rules — whoever identifies the first line get to takes a drink. “They’re getting good and warm over there, he said.

Otherwise it was an ordinary night at The Last Mile.

Deano swabbed the bar. A few guys were watching the Red Sox up on the Sanyo flat screen over the bar. They were over toward the front window by the red glow of the Rolling Rock neon sign facing the street and fairly close to the front door. They sat where the polished oak bar curves, a world away from poetry.

The poetry guys were along the back wall betwen the juke box and up against Knox’s Last Mile mural (which, when they weren’t concentrating on poetry, drew the interest of a few of these arty patrons. I was wondering where Knox was hiding. Probably upstairs in his apartment/studio. He’d have liked this bunch.)

I sat down on a bar stool and Deano, without my asking for it, served me up a cup of black coffee. I heard the knit-cap guy blurt out a first line. He had a gray beard and the knit cap was crunched down on his head, strands of gray hair poking out from under it. He appeared to be the ring master I was suddenly surmising that these guys must come from Cambridge — and this knit-cap guy must be the guy named Balin.)

“I have four poems for you, ” he said to the gathering, “all part of a sequence. ” There were — I counted — seven guys.

“First of the first lines,” the guy said, Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…

“Perhap?,” shouted one fellow. “Why did the poet hedge his damn bets? Is it or isn’it it?”

“Two, said the poetic interlocutor, ignoring the guy and going on. In my beginning is my end.

“Well, there’s a short life,” said some guy with a decided South Asian accent and a giant pilsner of beer in front of him. “Some little bugger squirting out of the womb only to expire.”

“Shut up,” said a short African-American guy. You’re getting disrespectful — and bloody stupid.”

“Three,” our man went on, I don’t know much about gods but I think the river is a strong brown god.

“Old Man River,” offered a guy wearing a scalley cap and, in contrast to everyone else I was hearing, manifesting a strong Boston accent.

“And Four,” said the man, ignoring that guy, too, and pausing for dramatic effect like they do on trivia night, which they don’t have at The Last Mile. (And I was thinking, is this the dawn of a unique kind of high-minded trivia night?

“Four, the guy said, for an even deeper effect, Midwinter spring is its own season.

“And sadly past,” said someone.

“Now, said the main guy in his knit cap, standing at the head of the table. “These beginning are the beginnings of poems in a famous cycle.”

“Too easy,” said one guy.

“Beginning to end,” said another wag.

I didn’t wait for the big reveal. I was back on the street and getting into my car, a bit of an ocean nip in the air. I remembered from reading it and liking it in English class in high school that the first poem ends in a neat inversion”

“In my end is my beginning.”

So much for beginnings and endings. As I came out front of the Mile, I saw the nurses going in, those regulars.

I wonder if any of them know any poetry. I know one of them once told me she tended to a dying man who’s last words to her were, “the fire and the rose are one.”

Maybe, if she and the girls sit close to that table, she’d finally find out how those words wound up on the lips of a dying man who was obviously also a dyed-in-the-wool lover of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.