Explore: Boston 3 ways, part 1

With R out of town I had a busy weekend of jumping on other people's band wagons, specifically of the picnic variety.

After three back-to-back adventures in the Boston area and a few days of rest I come equipped with a little lessons-learned nostalgia for gettin' down on some summer time activities.



And so,
Part 1) Forest Hills Lantern Festival (Thursday)

The Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, MA hosts this annual event that pays homage to an ancient Japanese, Buddhist ritual of spirits. Here you are meant to send a lit lantern sailing off onto the lake because at this moment a door to another world (one that ideally holds the spirits of your deceased loved ones) opens and lets your messages in. Sweet, really. But there are a few things to keep in mind before lantering:

Do: Pack a pimpin' picnic. Bring along a blanket to sit upon and some nibbles in re-closable containers so if you get distracted by the festivities (music and dancing among them) you can close and conquer. For our picnic we brought Farmers Market bounty, which included tomatoes, homemade bread, goats cheese and a fantastic Israeli spice smuggled in from the home land. Inspired by my recent wedding excursion, I brought accoutrement for white wine spritzers. True, not exactly your picnic fare, but if you can pull it off they are a refreshing delight. Which brings us to:

Don't: Bring white wine spritzers. Unless you are incredibly put together and an owner of clever things like a cooler and proper ice-keeping equipment, a simple beer would suffice.

Do: take part! To be honest, people look at you a little sideways if you're not inscribing your own lantern. Besides it's license for sentimentality -- shed a tear, coo at babies' lanterns dedicated to Grandma and Grandpa and resist the urge to sing a round of Kumbaya (over the top much?).

Don't: spend too much eating your righteous feast and miss out on drawing on a lantern (the whole POINT of the excursion). Along those same lines, don't wait until 8:29 to get said lantern to find that they have run out of the hearty wooden frames but can outfit you with a raspberry container (paper). Don't try to light the candle that sits in your raspberry container within the four walls of your paper lantern for at this moment what you're holding more closely resembles a homemade explosive device than a spiritual work of art. And don't count on your one-of-two options - ball of flames or sinking piece of paper trash - and the ensuing jokes to mesh well with the teary-eyed audience who now just view you as a heartless litter bug.



Do: Take your time, enjoy the evening. Sure it gets dark and that dessert you brought in three containers is a little harder to decipher. But how often do you get to hang around a lake at sunset with strangers in a cemetery. It's a delight. When people in brightly-colored jackets begin to take down the only light fixtures take your cue and leave.



Don't: Forget to make a note of where your car is. When the sun sets it is actually really dark out there and the winding roads that wrap around the stone grave markers all look eerily familiar. Don't let those friends walk off in search of the T because you will need buffers against the zombie vampires that like to attack clueless groups of less than four in the dark. When you finally find a helpful-looking man in a brightly colored vest sitting in a golf cart don't approach him at a full-sprint swinging your bag of contraband wine and shouting WAIT, DON"T LEAVE ME, because people don't usually respond well to crazy. Bring it down a notch. Ask politely, and when he still doesn't offer to drive you around the entire cemetery in search of your car that is parked in what lettered lot you know not (there were lettered lots?), swallow your pride and follow the direction of his point down the dark path toward what looks to be the road you came from. It's character building.

Next up, part 2: Outdoor Film Fest at the half shell (hint: bring your raincoats!)

xoL