Harvard Square has been my stomping grounds for a long time. I remember as a kid, around fifth grade, getting together with a couple of friends. We'd get a few bucks from our parents, walk, ride-bikes or get a ride over to Arlington Heights, and for a quarter we'd grab the bus down Mass Ave. into the Square. Thinking back on it now, I can't believe as fifth graders we were allowed to do this on our own, but we did. I guess times were different, and we had a great time.

We'd make the rounds and return on the bus with brown bags filled with vinyl records, comic books, and little knick-knacks and candies from some of the shops, returning home to listen to the records (mostly from used shops), read the comics and munch the sweets. Freedom combined with parental largess is a fundamental good.

Anyway, that was the beginning of my relationship with Cambridge culture. As we got older and entered High School, we stayed after the stores closed, watching the street musicians, hanging at some of the restaurants and loitering at the exit to the Harvard T stop smoking clove cigarettes. After I graduated, my folks sold the big house in the suburb and bought a condo right there in the Square. I stayed there during the summers and when I'd come home to visit from my dorm across the river at BU. I also used to party with my friend who was attending Harvard (I didn't get in, alas, and our lives have taken separate turns. Last I checked he was a magazine editor, while I...have a blog...).

Boston suburb, hangin' at Harvard Square...it's no wonder I grew up a card carrying member of the liberal left. It was like mother's milk. Democrat by default. All the smart people, the cool people, supported Democrats. To do otherwise was unthinkable. You swim in it. It becomes the sort of dementia a man kept too long in too small a cage out of the reach of the sun might get - forgetting there's a world beyond his walls and finding himself unable to relate. I understand completely how all those people in New York, and all those media outlets located there can start suffering a similar group dementia.

How times change. How a change of scenery can change the times.

I returned to Harvard Square today. I had a little business nearby, so I blew out of my office early, grabbed the family and off we went. A beautiful day in the city today, and a nice opportunity to walk around and waste some time.

I was not so at home as I once was. My politics just don't match the landscape anymore. How can you tell just by walking around in a place whether you "fit politically?" How can you feel it so strongly? Come on. This is Harvard Square, Cambridge we're talking about here! Every single store was full of all the requisite vicious barking moonbat "Bush is dumber than me" paraphernalia. I mean it was everywhere. You couldn't miss it. Add in a few guys on the street with DNC t-shirts asking people if they want to defeat George Bush (Sounds like they have a lot of faith in whoever it is they're selling - they couldn't even say his name.) and you know where you are.

It was a wake-up.

Anyway, we had a good time, and, our day over, we gassed up the SUV on clean-burning whale oil and headed home.