I have realized that, for the most part, travel is less plot than it is description. Fragmentary sketches of sentences with no verbs. I travel with a lot of novels, for reading in hotel beds before sleep, to add substance to what is otherwise mostly setting.

So I’m trying to remember what I remember about the Boston part of my travel and it’s coming to me in licks of recollection, contained in an glowing oeuvre, an overarching sense of having had a good time.

First there’s the notion of humanity breaching its containment. Tourists oozing out of shops onto the narrow sidewalks of the North End like long strings of drool. Wobbling bands of barrel-chested guys mobbed in front of open-windowed pubs near Fanoeil (sp) Hall cheering at the Red Sox game being played a couple of miles a way at Fenway. A grandiose scale of dishevelment at the end of the day throughout the thronged remnants of the produce market. Crowds on the platform as the arriving T blew one’s hair back.

Perfect weather. No one could shut up about it. How would you?

Then there’s my company. My sister in a sundress of taupes and whites, with matching cardigan and purse, delicate makeup, such a contrast to my cargo pants and fleece (I spilled the tartar sauce from my pub lunch on myself). David a beacon of adaptation and flexibility.

Using a route my sister penciled out for us we walked a thorough tracing of Boston’s historical landmarks. Graveyards dating from the mid-17th century, gravestones: “Here lyes ye body of…” The obelisk on Bunker Hill.

The sense of time as something to separate eating. My dinner once near MIT: crispy pork confit, fried quail egg, kimchee confit. Sweetbreads with rhubarb. Another dinner at a theme-park tapas place on the border with Somerville, an over-eager waiter that reminds David of George Carlin, pork sausages with figs. Cannolis from what the sister avows is the primo cannoli place in the North End (based on double-blind taste tests) even though we’ve just had fish sandwiches, baked beans, fries.