What happens if you drop your keys down the sewer?

It looked like she was ice fishing. But instead of sitting on a stool next to a hole in a frozen lake, she was sitting on the curb next to the Boston sewer drain alternately letting down and gathering back up a long multicolored piece of yarn tied to what appeared to be a bathroom tile with magnets stuck to it.

Who hasn’t held their keys a bit tighter or at least had the thought “that would suck,” when walking over a Boston City Sewer grate?

Lauren and her mother, Karen, had been packing up the car to head to Maine for the weekend. The sun was out, there was a slight breeze but it felt like Spring - finally. Karen was rearranging the trunk, and when she bent over to pick up something that fell near the bumper, her keys flew out of her possession and went straight down the sewer drain with a splash and a thud.

Take a moment to think about what you would do.

Lauren fishing for keys when a neighbor stops to call the Mayor's resource hotline.

The two women had decidedly different reactions. Mom panicked. Her heart heart sunk into her stomach she says she even tried prying open the grate (didn’t budge) and she definitely cried in frustration. Lauren kept calm and started Googling ways to retrieve your keys from a storm drain. Then she fashioned her makeshift fishing line, changed into sweats and got to work sending the weighted magnet down into a pool of runoff water in the hope of getting the keys to stick.

Lauren has always had a solid head on her shoulder, says her mom. “If I were stranded on a desert island, if I were with her, I’d be OK.” She says. “She takes after her dad.”

Karen and Lauren

She’ll next be using that level head in the US Navy. When Lauren graduates from Tufts dental school this May, she’ll be a dentist and a lieutenant in the Navy. After two years of living in Cleveland Circle, she’s shipping off to North Carolina for Officer training boot camp. And she’s excited for this next adventure.

The closest thing Lauren’s had to a panicked moment in recent years was her junior year in undergrad. She’d always thought she’d be a pediatrician but after volunteering at a hospital she realized the lifestyle didn’t leave much room for a family some day. And Lauren is a family kind of girl - she transferred from Florida to Boston to be closer to her parents and two siblings who live in Maine.

But with the new knowledge she didn’t actually want to be a pediatrician, after years of thinking she would be, she felt lost and like a failure. It didn’t help that she was going through a bad break up at the time. “I remember her telling me she had felt like she failed. But I said, ‘honey, it’s not like you dropped out of school! You’re not failing,’ ” recollects her mother.

But, Lauren is a cheerful, optimistic person, so even that was a hurdle quickly overcome. In a matter of months she had a new plan that kept her on a similar track.

Despite the fact that her mom is a dental hygienist, it wasn’t until a family friend went to dental school, that she got to thinking about pursuing dental school. It turns out it’s a perfect fit.

“A lot of people dread going to the dentist,” she says “And the fact that I have the ability to take someone who is in a lot of pain and make them feel better is really satisfying.”

Back by the sewer, she fished up some trash but no keys when a neighbor walked by and asked if they had called the Mayor’s Hotline. Mother and daughter both cocked their heads and were all ears. “I didn’t even know there was one?” said Lauren. Since neither had their phones on them, so the friendly neighbor made the call.

The city trucks were there within the hour, prying open the grate (with tools). They even had a blue towel to wipe the keys with.

“Our Guardian Angel!”

Boston utility workers to the rescue!

The mayor’s resource hotline:

Check out the website:

https://www.cityofboston.gov/mayor/24/

Carolina the exchange student

Imagine leaving your friends, family, and everything you’ve known your entire life, to go live 3,000 miles in a place where no one knows you or speaks your language, and even the things you thought you knew how to do, like pay a bill at a restaurant, are fraught with uncomfortable surprises.

That’s what Carolina did. She’d been planning to become a foreign exchange student as long as she can remember, “for the adventure.”

Some people might be content with a road trip a bit closer to home. But not Carolina.

She was a little nervous, she admits, but says for the wrong reasons:

“ I thought that people were going to be meaner,” she says.  “And when I got here everyone was so friendly, I was surprised. I was like: ‘Why are strangers smiling to me on the street?’”

What she didn’t anticipate was a strong urge to fit in. Talking to people when she first got to Boston last August made her heart beat fast. She was worried, especially in class at Boston College where she is one of some 200 exchange students feathered into a student body of more than 14,400, that she’d say the wrong thing and people would give her blank stares or - worse - not be able to understand what she was trying to say.

But after a while, and weathering a couple embarrassing moments (“I didn’t know people tip how they do here, that was uncomfortable”) Carolina settled into her new life, and embraced her (surprisingly slight) accent. It brings out a different sound and perspective, she says.

Eight months have taught her a lot about herself, how she reacts to new situations and having much more alone time than she did at home in Quito, Ecuador, has surprised her. On a whim one day she bought some water colors and discovered she loved painting and that has opened her up to include the possibility of visual arts being part of her future.

“I guess that being uncomfortable is not always terrible,” she says. “It does feel weird and gets sad sometimes, but I think it’s worth it, getting to know the world and yourself.”

Carolina says she read a lot of advice about how her year in the US might go, but she says there’s no substitute for just taking the leap and going abroad. Go, she says. “You’ll discover things that no one will tell you.”

Make a change, affect a change Brian

For the better part of 10 years, Brian felt like a square peg in a round hole.

Right out of high school he enrolled in the Navy - in part to travel the world, in part to make his father, a career military man, proud. He was quickly sent to Afghanistan, where he helped load missiles onto the planes. He did OK, he says, but after eight years and some butting of heads, his heart wasn’t in it, so he left in search of civilian life.

He didn’t realize how difficult that would be.

It was a package of horribles for the next three years. He found an engineering job that he thought was up his alley, but after almost a decade in the military and receiving orders from his superiors, not having a hands-on supervisor and clear direction left him feeling rudderless. His fiance left him, then he was let go at work. Since he was living on the opposite coast from his family with no support network, he turned to pizza and ribs and gambling and the World of Warcraft video game to get through. He was bitter, unsure, and “not exactly someone you’d want to be around,” he says. Without a solid social network, he spent multiple Thanksgivings at Boston Market, alone. He still gets choked up thinking about that time.

He had some very dark moments, and he thought about giving up, “I’m not proud to say it,” he says.

But people can change. And Brian clearly has.

There were some key shining events spliced through that painful time that helped turn things around for Brian. They were good things he didn’t necessarily see at the time: By leaving the military he was forced to put his inclination to stick to himself aside. Because he wasn’t happy at work, he was thinking a lot about what his passion might be. And after his girlfriend broke up with him he took a vacation on the recommendation of a colleague. It was there, talking with strangers, that he realized he was fascinated by the way people thought. So when he was eventually fired, the idea of getting in to psychology practically hit him over the head.

He enrolled in school for psychology in New York, and it blew him away. “I learned a lot about myself in school. My biggest adjustment was realizing how messed up I was  – how immature I was – mentally and emotionally, and that I needed to fix a lot of things between my father and I.”

And he started to work on himself. “I used to think everyone else had to change.” Now, he says “I’d had enough people [figuratively] slapping me in the face… to realize the way I was acting hasn’t worked for me in the past it probably won’t work for me, so maybe I just need to listen to somebody.”

That wasn't always easy, but his father told him something that he says resonated with him: “Only people who care about you will give you feedback and criticism. People who don’t [care] about you aren’t going to say anything. They’ll let you fall on your face.”

And Brian didn't want that for himself. From the time Brian was small, he has wanted to make a difference, but, he says, “If you would have told me 10 years ago that I'd be going into social work, I would have laughed at you.”

Now it feels like home. He starts a specialized graduate program at Boston College in a few months and is excited for it to begin.

He’s practically a new man; He's been happily married to a woman who he loves deeply a year this month, it's easy for him to strike up conversations with neighbors, and he lights up when he talks about about sitting down with vets and helping them reenter the civilian world at his volunteer job with the department of Veteran’s Affairs. He’s able to see the big picture, now. “The biggest thing I learned,” he says, “is you can’t give up.”

And that’s the message he wants to help other vets understand.

"I’m on my way," he says. "A living testimony of grace. Hopefully my story can be encouraging to others."

Kathleen leaves no fingerprints

It would be pretty hard to frame Kathleen for some sort of crime using her fingerprints. That’s because her body is chemically incapable of leaving prints on many surfaces. It’s a rare condition she found out about while working with the Secret Service during her undergrad at American University.

If she hadn’t have gone to Prague on a study abroad while she was in school for International Relations she may have gone on to work for the FBI or the CIA. She went back to school for screenwriting and then off to LA, instead. (The fingerprints didn't have anything to do with career change, so much as encouragement from a professor).

Kathleen

No, not everyone can say they worked for the Secret Service in DC or the set of Grey’s Anatomy in LA, but there’s more: Add to the long list of Kathleen’s talents and interests: dog whispering, sound effect timing and creation at baseball games, and culinary arts. You see, she’s a bit of a renaissance woman.

Every bit a versatile woman, she is not afraid to change direction. After writer strikes in LA and some soul searching in Georgia, and a car accident, Kathleen says she’s learned better than to resist career changes. After the accident injured her back making it difficult to stand up all day in the corporate kitchens where she worked, her sister offered her a job with her doggie day care.

She likes it, she says, and it’s clear from how the two sweet dogs circle around her and lean into her for affection, she’s good at what she does.

“It’s not exactly where I thought I’d be, or at all what I thought I’d be doing,” she explains but adds “You may plan for the future, but you just have to go with what life gives you.”

Her lab mix Bentley jumps up on her and leans in for cuddles, and Kathleen obliges.

Bentley Kathleen and Ellie

Favorite thing about Cleveland Circle:

“That we have three different Green Line T-stops…  Besides the T, the restaurants.”

Super Brian

I met Brian in the middle of a snow storm. I was just getting ready to push my blue plastic shovel into a mound of slush in front of my truck, when he, walking toward his orange honda element work truck, turned and asked me if I wanted to borrow his metal shovel, explaining that it might be easier in this snow.

"Well, if you need it, feel free to grab it," he told me pointing to a shovel leaning against his house as he continued to chip ice on the walk in front of the house.

It's a large, three-story Victorian, built in the late 1890s. When Brian's dad, a local contractor, bought it in the 1990s it was all but abandoned: boarded up, the utilities were shut off, and it had white aluminum siding in disrepair.  When he was in high school, Brian used to drive his family's tan Ford Taurus station wagon over to the house and load it up and take it to the dump.  Over the years he and the old house built a connection.

He could be a farmer with his Carhart overalls, gravely voice, worn sweater, and love of old buildings, coffee, the outdoors, and working and crafting with his hands (he did come close to turning an old plot of land in Dover into his own dream farm once).  His passion for research and knowledge and writing about sustainable environments and people had him studying to be a journalist in Oregon.

But there is something magical and fulfilling about the act of finding something that has been discarded and giving it a new use and a second chance. Think: Loyd Khan.

Shortly after graduating from college, Brian moved into an apartment on the top floor of the house on Englewood Ave. His mom was going through some health issues nearby and his father needed help with the business. There was a lot to be done.

In fact, the idea that he should be the one doing, kept nagging at him while he was writing and reporting on the lives of others in Oregon, so when the role of landlord and property manager of the Englewood house eventually fell to him, “I didn’t regret it,”  he says, leaning back in his chair draping his arm over the edge. And now he and his brother are property managers of four buildings in the area.  

It's a job that keeps him doing, and brings a certain amount of freedom with it. He doesn’t have to wear a tie, and he can take a break for a snowball throwing contest in the middle of the day if he needs to - as he did the other day with Bob the mailman and another neighbor (Bob won, Brian wants a rematch). It also utilizes the creativity his artist mom instilled in her four children.

“You’re always learning something. An oil burner wouldn’t turn on the other night, ... So you learn how to do it and you feel really good…. you feel a little more connected to the building, feel a little more wise as a member of society, it’s cool.

But it also means if there's something wrong with the lights, plumbing, sidewalk, or radiator, one of 40-some tenants of his old Boston buildings will pick up the phone. People can take their frustrations out on whomever answers it.

“I don’t know anyone else who gets yelled at every day.”

How are you not bitter?

"I am bitter" he says with an easy grin.

But if he is bitter, it doesn’t show. He picks up trash around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir where he and his dog Virgil walk often,  and he’s a chatty neighbor, recognizing and greeting the people who walk past his yard.

He concedes: “It hasn’t made me permanently bitter or a cynic,” adding, “We had a saying in my family growing up: Don't let them rent a space in your head.”

Virgil is a 3-year-old rescue named after The Band's song. He also loves cuddles from the ladies.