i was reading on the train and at boylston three very bent little old people crept into my compartment so naturally i stood up and to my surprise at that very same moment four other people sitting in front of me got up too. they were young people, in their early twenties, boston college students i thought, and the three old people got their seats. it made me very happy, but at the same time i wonder why i should feel so surprised or pleased. that is, why do i always underestimate bostonians? even before moving to cambridge i've felt great misgivings about moving to a city in a part of the country where the people are seen to be insufferably rude and hard. time spent away from uva has led only to theintensification of what is in truth mere habitual idealisation of charlottesville as a place where people are nice if not by nature then in deference to a tacit social contract, but every unpleasantness experienced in boston which bears out my prejudices i feel a great deal of sourness about. i don't think i've ever recovered from my only trip to chicago four years ago, where in the space of three days everything - from the traffic jams and cold weather and an arrest i witnessed at the airport tobreaking up with kenneth - colluded to make me feel nothing but black, unmitigated dislike for that city - and every incident of unkindness or rudeness thereafter by which my prejudices were proven i abscribe to the city setting when what i am really thinking about is the day where i was on a bus where the driver refused to let kenneth swipe his card for me and suddenly finding myself without fare and only bills in my purse and having to go down the bus asking if someone could make change so that i might pay the fare where i met only with coldness and outright rudeness and even one woman who said scornfully "don't you know better than to get on a bus with a twenty?" before she turned to look out of the window, and all the time kenneth fuming in his seat refusing to lift a finger - and in growing panic and humiliation the one clear thought in my mind then was that in charlottesville this would never have happened - someone would have found change or else paid my fare and have been sympathetic and i would have heard "that's all right hon" several times by then. and in the incident of trying to exchange my T token for a dollar in central square i felt the old bitterness again, and there we go what do you know hated unsympathetic jerks so typical isn't it them city people not a drop of human kindess the cold-blooded beasts... so that i can't give up my seat without feeling as if marked as an outsider - because so often i see myself extending charlottesville manners to boston and feeling myself snubbed at every turn. and yet i have also encountered extraordinary grace and consideration at different times, and each time that i am startled i am unfair to this city.