Boston, Cheers, and Antique Shops

Today my dad and I took a bus tour of Boston and Cambridge. The tour guides/bus drivers were all quite amusing and informative.

The first stop on our tour of Boston was the Cheers bar. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood full of—you guessed it—really old buildings. Years ago my dad had said that Aunt Barbara owned an antique store next door to or around the corner from the Cheers bar, and many of her “customers” were people asking where the bar was located. However, carrying a business card we found at Aunt Barbara’s condo, we discovered that the antique store was located around the corner and down the street several blocks—it wasn’t as close as we had pictured it.

 The Cheers Bar, around the corner from Aunt Barbara's former antique shop

Interior of Cheers Bar, in the basement; the restaurant is upstairs.

We came to the address for what was formerly Mayfield Antiques, and it’s now a real estate agent’s office. It looked like nothing but a door in a narrow space—other shops appeared to be on either side of the door, so perhaps the office was upstairs. The agent, probably in his thirties and wearing a suit, happened to be on the doorstep while we stood looking up at the door and the black paneled number “49” above it. He talked with us (my dad, a retired newspaper reporter, can talk to everyone except my mother). He suggested we visit an antique store up the street named White and Crane (I think that was the name), because they had been in business forever and might remember Aunt Barbara and her shop.

We wandered further up the street—lined with beautiful old buildings with lots of paneling and brick and dormer windows and mansard roofs. Many of the shops were antique stores, so the competition must have been fierce when Aunt Barbara had her shop here twenty years ago. We came to the antique shop that had been in business a very long time (two hundred years, by the look of it), but it was closed for a long lunch break. The front was very dark paneled wood with big many-paneled windows displaying an impressive array of antiques.

One of the antique shops had, displayed in its front window, a large wooden cabinet, perhaps a sideboard, which contained among other things several sets of Stafford dogs. Another had a white china cat in the window, and another had a black china dog.

We backtracked to a Tibetan shop I had spotted and drooled over a block away, on the same side of the street as Aunt Barbara’s former shop. The Tibetan shop was in the basement, with its front window visible a few feet above ground. We stepped down into the shop, and I admired embroidered clothing and pillows and a good selection of books, particularly on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. The owner was a guy probably in his thirties who not only looked Tibetan but was carrying on a phone conversation in what sounded like Tibetan. I picked out three books about Tibetan women and begged my dad to get them for me, which he did. He chatted with the store owner and told him I’d been to Tibet, so we talked about that a little. I also looked around at other fabric items while my dad used the restroom. We returned to the tour bus stop, having decided we’d wait and have lunch someplace other than the Cheers bar because this had been only our first stop in Boston.