A new book ponders why we fall in love with commercial centers — and why we ache so much when they change.
My father took me to Harvard Square quite a bit when I was a kid.
We’d browse at Wordsworth, flip through the CDs at Newbury Comics, and sit at a high top at 33 Dunster Street, where I’d order a Shirley Temple and a cheeseburger with fries.
I was too young to understand the square’s mystique but not too young to feel it: the Ivy League heft and, a couple of decades after Joan Baez debuted at Club 47, the tendrils of bohemia.
My dad was in his element there. I liked that.
Over the lunch, he’d tell me about the Richard Thompson album he’d just picked up. And we’d talk Red Sox and school and summer camp.
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Then we’d make our way back to whatever beater he was driving at the moment and head home, a little happier than we’d arrived.
My dad died years ago. And as an adult, I haven’t spent as much time in Harvard Square. But a couple of weeks ago, I took my 14-year-old daughter and her friend across the Charles in search of some of the feeling I’d had as a kid.
