I don’t get into the city much anymore. I have young kids and I work at home and I never seem to have the time. But tonight I met a good friend for a drink, and we wound up making three stops in town, all unplanned, chosen at the spur of the moment. All three reminded me why I love this place.

First, a drink in a bar on West Street, just off the Common. The bar was nothing special, but on the way out we noticed a plaque. It said the space was once a bookstore that was the hub of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist movement, a place frequented by Emerson and Thoreau. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann each were married there, to two of the once-famous Peabody Sisters. For a long time, that little building must have been a derelict in the old Combat Zone.

Then we ducked in next door at the wonderful, dusty, immortal (I hope) Brattle Book Shop, now 185 years old. I was looking for a copy of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, an old favorite whose tone I intend to rip off — or try to — in an upcoming novel. Instead I found another book by Greene, A Gun for Sale, plus a strange CD collecting Greene’s interviews with the BBC. I had no idea I wanted these things until I saw them, which is why real bookstores can never be replaced by Amazon. (Displaced, maybe.)

Finally, dinner around the corner at Jacob Wirth’s, another venerable Boston institution, this one 140-odd years old. On the menu was this lovely quote from a waiter at Jake’s named Frederick “Fritz” Fruth, 1875-1951, which seemed to sum up the whole adventure:

Yesterday it was the fathers who were my friends. Today it is the sons. Yesterday a man came in and brought his boy. Today that boy’s son comes in and calls me Fritz, just as his grandfather and father did before him. Are they different? I don’t know. Sometimes I think they don’t take as much time to eat as their grandfathers did, but then the world moves faster today. They like to sit at the same table. I look at the young man and see the father, and my memory goes back to many things when I should be thinking of frankfurters and pumpernickel bread.