50th birthdays and Ho Chi Minh

Okay, this is weird. My last two hotel stays have been in places that hosted the 50th birthday celebrations of national figures. The first was the Lake Placid Resort, where Bill Clinton’s 50th was celebrated not so many years ago. The second was the Parker House in Boston, where poet/author/father of a Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was feted some time further back — not too surprising, the Parker House being just up the street from the Old Corner Bookstore, where Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the whole gang used to gather. More surprising, to those of us who have lost a little bit of our Vietnamese history, was the discovery that Ho Chi Minh was once a pastry chef in the Parker House. (Malcolm X was a busboy, but somehow that doesn’t seem like quite the enlightened role an establishment would like to say it played in the development of a national figure.)

As it happens, I had not a single Parker House Roll, nor a Boston Cream Pie, during my stay in the Hub, but I did get to visit the Granary Burial Ground, just around the corner from the Parker House and a short jaunt from the Common, and was delighted to find therein the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Ben Franklin’s parents, and Crispus Attucks (and the rest of the Boston Massacre group). Quite impressive to have so many notables in one place, and the stones, though well-worn, are beautiful.