The Butlers

I am gonna jump ahead a little. Anyone could tell we were a dysfunctional family. We were blatant mutants. Each child rebelling anew against parents too tired, too isolated, and overwrought to be concerned. Our landlords, the Butlers, were saints to my mother, and they probably are the only altruistic landlords I ever met. They could of rented that apartment for easily twice what they got from us. We payed a thousand, which is still a lot in the eighties, but this was a four bed room three bath, my father had a little study, my mother had a porch study. Which was always cold or hot, but was a storage space for her art and art related stuff. Which was extensive. We had space in the basement with a washer and dryer. And we were in Brookline. Brookline is a quaint little town surrounded on three sides by Boston. It is comfortable and peaceful in a way that makes a person feel that rational intelligent beings operate in the world and make well considered decisions. Until you turn on the TV. The city of Boston is the hub of education in the world, with over a hundred colleges in the area, including Harvard, MIT,Boston College, Tufts, to name the power players. The city line of Brookline runs just on the far far side, away from the river, of Commonwealth ave. Which runs from the commons, a central park downtown out to Newton somewhere. It runs past Boston University and Boston college. Essentially beginning at the doorsteps of these educational institutions. I lived by packered corner, where Comm ave and the B line turned and   Allston grew out of some vague tail between the Charles and Comm ave connected to Boston proper. It was an ideal location. A couple of miles up Comm ave and you were in Kenmore sq., or cut down Linden street and into Lower Allston and you could easily cross into Harvard square in Cambridge. Brookline could of been called little Israel. Or it could of been called the Professors neighborhood, but that does not have a good ring to it. It's public school was in the top fifteen high schools in the country, public and private. So that thousand dollars a month rent went a long ways. Consider as well that they allowed five people, three of them teenage boys to live above them. And you could hear us. I distinctly remember being in their side if the house and hearing someone upstairs, and thinking, damn, we run around the place like that all the time. My family is a herd of wilderbeasts tromping up and down the stairs all day long. It was then that I started to realize my mother was right. the Butlers were Saints. They were the only thing holding our messed up little family together and they were not even connected to the family. We never even gave them a thought. There was a time when we had been friends. Before we lived there we would visit them. They had spent time in Japan, and my parents had been married there. They had met my parents at my first nursery school. A little place on a dead end street in Harvard square. Matthew, their oldest was in the grade above me, but I was young anyway, so we were probably thrown together. Aaron would of been to young. Matthew and Aaron were good kids. they did well in school. Matthew got in to Pole vaulting in High school. They looked like nerds. But gone were the days of watching dukes of hazard in our youth. Gone also were the days of playing ping pong in the basement with Mark and Chris Bradley. At some point the Butlers just accepted they were stuck with the Boyers for at least ten years. But the less we actually saw eachother, the less they had to think about our dysfunctional existence the better. Or at least that is how I assumed they though. Jim, and probably more Susan may have had their spats with my family, but it was never a big deal for me, and my mother kept me up to date. So yeah, they were saints