Tom Menino liked to say he was a Boston guy.
Which he was, through and through.
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But in Boston we are tribal and parochial and ridiculously territorial, and so among ourselves it gets down to neighborhoods and parishes and streets and which end of those streets.
So Tom Menino was from Hyde Park.
But within our neighborhoods there are smaller neighborhoods.
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So Tom Menino was from Readville.
I walked around Hyde Park in the hours after news of Menino's death spread, and it would be great and amazing to tell you that everybody I talked to had met him. Many had. But it was nowhere near that amazing statistic, which his successor, Marty Walsh, noted on City Hall Plaza in paying tribute to Tom, that half of the people in the city had met him at some point during his 20-year tenure as mayor.
That stat was always misleading. It wasn't that Tom Menino had met half the people in the city. It's that he met almost everybody in the city who bothered to vote.
Most of the people I talked to in Hyde Park are immigrants. They aren't from Hyde Park. They are Hyde Park. They were exactly the people Tom Menino identified with, those who some might judge for the way they look or the way they talked. Tom Menino didn't dress like Tom Brady. He didn't talk like Tom Brokaw.
The people in Hyde Park talked about Menino like he was one of the few people in this world with real power who actually cared about them as much if not more than he cared about the suits downtown.
My favorite story in Hyde Park came from a 26-year-old waitress named Dawn Martin. Last fall, Tom Menino and his wife Angela walked into The Fairmount Grille on Fairmount Avenue on a quiet Sunday. They were the only customers.
The then still-mayor told Martin he'd like a burger. Angela ordered the pasta.
Dawn Martin turned to put the order in, but then she turned back.
'When I was in fifth grade,' she told Tom Menino, 'I sang a song for you with my class at the Blackstone School.'
Tom Menino, already struggling with his health, sat up in his chair.
'You know,' Martin continued, 'you're the only mayor I've ever known. My whole life.'
Tom Menino smiled and looked at his wife.
'How long have you been waitressing?' Tom Menino asked Dawn Martin.
'I just started,' she replied.
'Well,' he said, 'you're very good at it.'
It was a small kindness. But it was something Dawn Martin, just a young woman working to get ahead, will never forget.
'I'm so sorry he died,' Martin said. 'I wished he got a chance to spend more time with his family. He deserved it.'
There is the likelihood -- nay, a certainty -- that Tom Menino's death will unleash a communal grieving, which is absolutely appropriate, and severe bouts of hagiography, which are not.
Tom Menino was not a saint. He was a politician. And long before he was a politician, he was a human being. Sometimes he could be vindictive. His feud with the developer Don Chiofaro was positively juvenile. The first Boston mayor of Italian heritage, Tom Menino could sometimes act like a well-balanced Irishman, with chips on both shoulders.
But you should measure a politician against the people he cared about, and Tom Menino cared about those on the fringes, whether they were homeless or poor or living on Bowdoin Street or dying on Blue Hill Avenue.
Some people made fun of his malapropisms. He told me all that mocking didn't bother him, but I know it did. Of course, it says more about the bullies who would mock and laugh at him than it says about him. Like all of us, insecurities drove Tom Menino in both directions, but it almost always drove him in the right direction.
He had enormous empathy for gay people who were ostracized by family or verbally and physically abused by strangers. He was a monitor at Hyde Park High during the desegregation of the city's public schools in the 1970s, and he detested racists and racism.
Tom Menino was human and he wasn't right all the time, but he was almost always on the right side. And that was almost always with those who were, like the physical location of Hyde Park, on the edge, on the fringe, as far removed from the center of power and the center of the city as Readville is from Beacon Hill.
We all have regrets in our life. One of mine will be that I was supposed to spend last Monday night on the stage at First Parish Church in Cambridge with Tom Menino, talking to him about the memoir he wrote with Jack Beatty.
It would have been a lot of fun. One of the things I wanted to ask Tom was whether he thought he could have been elected in Cambridge, which is separated from Boston by a river and a lot of stereotypes.
I'm guessing he would have said yes, that his values would have resonated, that he would have had as much credibility in Central Square and North Cambridge as he did in Cleary Square and the North End. People are people. Values are values.
We could have had a rap about the irony of sitting in the First Parish Church in Cambridge when it was the First Parish Church in Dorchester where Tom had his first debate as a mayoral candidate in 1993. Last year, in one of his final events as mayor, Tom went back to the First Parish on Meetinghouse Hill and recalled that debate.
I asked him what he most remembered about that debate. He said there were so many candidates -- about a dozen -- that it was too crowded. He was sitting next to Rosaria Salerno, one of the candidates, and she moved her chair, nudging him. Being a Hyde Park guy, of course, his chair was on the edge of the stage
'I almost fell off,' he told me. 'I coulda died.'
And now he has.
I got a call from somebody last week, saying that Tom's health was such that he couldn't do the book event. A day later, we found out that he had decided to give the finger to cancer and stop treatment.
It was classic Tom Menino. Like when, after the Marathon bombs, he got out of bed against a doctor's advice. He had stuff to do. Tom wasn't the kind of guy to put off the inevitable. It wasn't the first time he told doctors, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' but it was the last.
He did things his way. He was like that his whole life. Why would he change at the end?
He loved the Frank Sinatra version of 'My Way.' The Paul Anka version, he could take or leave. Once, over dinner last year at Joe Greene's place West on Centre in West Roxbury, I encouraged the then still-mayor to listen to the Sid Vicious cover.
Tom put his fork down, turned his attention away from his veal, tilted his head and gave me that look.
'Who the heck,' he asked, 'is Sid Vicious?'
I think Sid Vicious was the only guy who could vote that Tom Menino never met.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com
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