Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

Highway 20 is a Boston classic. Winding, narrow, extended out of 'Main Street.' I try to avoid it as much as possible, but since it's the principal route between the place where I work and my favorite place to shop, I get stuck on it now and then.
Tonight I noticed how particularly odd it is that in order to avoid turn-only lanes on both sides you have to keep dodging back and forth between lanes. If you can call them that. When they paved the highway, some forward-minded citizen stepped up and said, "Now, let's not paint any LANES, per se. Better to leave it as is, so we can use it for whatever purpose seems best at the time." And they did, making it comfortably wide enough for two and a half lanes, which are sometimes used as parking and a lane, sometimes two lanes, and sometimes parking and two lanes, one of which is invariably either stopped trying to make a turn or swinging out into oncoming traffic trying to get around the other.
Then there are the signs. "Left turn only" is just as likely to be posted on the right side of the road as the left; more so, in fact. This fact requires acuity of eyesight and a mental readiness which must have done much in making Boston's citizens so famed in intellect and the arts. This particular evening, I was driving in the left lane, shooting desperate glances at the small sign on the right. I was fairly sure it meant one of the lanes was turn only, but I couldn't be sure which. In the dark, I was having trouble seeing. Finally I ascertained that it said left and swung over into the right. As I drew closer, I realized the cause of the trouble I was having. "Left lane must turn left" it proclaimed -- upside down. One of these days they should put this road system in a museum.