The Village, where the witches are green

One of the things about spending time in Boston is that I spend a lot of time riding the T. So I often look at the map, which contains wondrous exotic place names. I’m not sure I want to visit these places, because the reality could never measure up to the enchantment conjured by such evocative words as Alewife, Wonderland and Braintree.

If life were indeed a fantasy, I would very much want to go to Wonderland, named for the charming yet sadly short lived amusement park of that name early in the 20th century. But I am not at all sure I would want to visit a place that has a Braintree. I would indeed like to meet the Alewife one day, but I have no idea what she would be like.

Seeing it all through the eyes of a visitor, I realize that my own home turf — Greenwich Village — must look hopelessly exotic on a map. What sort of folk be they (I can almost hear a would-be visitor wonder), who live in the Village, where the witches are green.

By the way, I should send a shout-out to Neil Gaiman, who used a similar idea in his wonderful BBC teleplay and then novel Neverwhere, which posited a parallel world in which the names of stops on the London Underground, such as “Knightsbridge”, “Earl’s Court”, “Hammersmith” and “Blackfriars”, were literal descriptions.

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