Clearing the table

There was a point Wednesday, about halfway through that lunch with the two mayoral candidates, when I half expected that Maura Hennigan would turn to Tom Menino and say, ''I hate the way you chew."

The poor guy could not do anything right. Hennigan essentially accused Menino of bungling the city's tax assessments, ruining a major development deal, single-handedly causing a spike in homicides, and wreaking havoc on the public schools. And then she really went after him.

Which is what brought me yesterday to the sun-splashed shores of Jamaica Pond. During the lunch, I asked Hennigan what her favorite place was in Boston. She said it was Jamaica Pond and added that Menino has pretty much ruined the place by failing to maintain it.

Specifically, what Hennigan said was: ''Let me tell you, at Jamaica Pond, the pond I jog at on a daily basis, the grass was cut twice all summer. The weeds surrounding the banks of the pond were not cut till the beginning of October. The pathways there are crumbling."

In other words, the whole place sounded as if it were in complete disarray. I almost grabbed a hazmat suit and a machete just to make my way around it.

But once I arrived, I saw something I didn't expect, which was people, lots of people, happy people, traversing the edges of the pond, pushing baby strollers, walking dogs, sitting on the short grass gabbing on cellphones in the wan autumn sun.

And, yes, that descriptive is correct: short. If the grass was cut only twice all season, one of those times must have been this week. I gingerly walked the paths, making sure not to trip on the crumbling concrete. But there was little need for worry; the paths, but for the occasional crack, seemed impressively intact.

At some point, I came across a gentleman named Lenton Mency sitting on an upside down bucket at the water's edge, holding a fishing rod with a line that gently swayed in the afternoon breeze.

Mency, from Dorchester, is a pond regular, and when I asked him what he thought about the upkeep, he looked around at the glistening pond and the green fields and said: ''It's beautiful here. They keep it clean. They cut all the branches down." He pointed to a newly lined shore and added, ''They put those stones in over there a couple of years ago."

I asked if there were fish to catch, and he proudly replied that the pond gets stocked annually -- by the state, I learned later. ''I saw a guy catch an 11-pound salmon this year," Mency said.

Which brings me to the point. Hennigan needs to be careful. It's great she's running for mayor. She's doing this city a favor by holding a powerful, entrenched politician accountable for his decisions and actions over a long stretch of time.

By most logical measures, Menino has been a good mayor with spasms of mediocrity and greatness, yet I find myself wondering what he might accomplish in four more years that he hasn't been able to get done in the previous 12.

But in Maura's world, everything that Menino is, everything that he's done, is disastrous. That stellar bond rating? A sham. The slowly improving schools? A wreck. The crime rates that have dropped so dramatically in the past dozen years? A blip. Has she lost all credibility?

Let me put it another way. I talked yesterday to Kyle Warwick, the New England director of Spaulding & Slye Colliers, once a partner at Fan Pier. At lunch, Hennigan said that a company executive told her a few years ago that Menino killed a potential collaborative development because he didn't like neighboring landowner Frank McCourt.

''It's absolutely not true," Warwick said. ''We never said that. Quite to the contrary, we were encouraged to collaborate with everyone down there."

Whom to believe? As I think about the pristine fields and clean paths at Jamaica Pond, I think I have a pretty good idea.

I'm glad Maura Hennigan is running for mayor. I just wish she wasn't running off at the mouth so much.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.