A choice worth having

One morning last week, in a scruffy grammar school auditorium in the heart of Dorchester, Thomas M. Menino sat quietly in the front row with his elbows on his knees and his eyes trained on a group of costumed children performing an impossibly cute skit nearby.

The only film crews were parents wielding little video cameras, and when Menino, a grandfather to three pupils in the school, got up to deliver the requisite remarks, he committed his typical butchery, one word haphazardly colliding with the next, sentences falling off a cliff, G's omitted from where they belonged.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, ''Whenever I come here, I'm never sure if I go by Papa or Mayor." And with that, the point of it all, this quasi-historic Election Day, came pounding home.

Say what you will about Tom Menino, even say what his worthy challenger, Maura A. Hennigan, already has, that crime is rising because we need more cops, that schools aren't nearly as good as they should be, that residents are paying higher taxes for fewer services. But there's something else worth saying as well: Menino, for all his famous faults, is as authentic a son of Boston as we've had in power in a long, long time, that rare politician who innately understands the people who keep electing him their mayor.

In many significant ways, their lives are his life. His wife goes off to work every day. His son serves as a Boston cop. His grandchildren attend a Dorchester elementary school where parents hold bake sales and raffle Red Sox tickets to raise money for a courtyard playground.

Maybe it's me, but politicians these days seem like featherweights. They're actually starting to look alike, talk alike, act alike, as odorless, colorless, and flavorless as their consultants tell them to be, the better not to offend voters.

And then there's Menino. He let's things get under his skin. He disdains criticism. He abhors end runs. I could go on.

Yet, it gives him uniqueness, if not gravitas. He stabilized the chronically underperforming public schools, transformed a notoriously shoddy public housing system, and in the 1990s oversaw such a precipitous drop in gun violence that the program was known nationally as ''The Boston Miracle." He did much of it by simply appointing the right people to the right jobs and clearing out of their way.

Ask him about a neighborhood, and he's liable to launch into a description of the 40-year shopkeeper in Codman Square or the great plate of pasta he had in Roslindale or the retiring suit salesman at Filene's Basement. His vision may not be sweeping, but it is penetrating.

On another day last week, Menino stood in a church basement in the Back Bay helping to inaugurate a program to combat homelessness, repeatedly praising the group's ''meatball supper," its annual fund-raising event. He remembers the little things because to him, the little things loom large, the bane and the beauty of the man.

On his way out the door, he fished a photograph of a baby girl out of his wallet and handed it to me. He told a story of how he persuaded a pregnant woman to accept shelter during a homeless census a few years ago. Later, when she gave her baby up for adoption, she told officials at the proceeding that Menino helped save her child. The new father recently met Menino at a business meeting, handed him the photo, and said, ''You changed my life."

Menino shrugged at me and said, ''This is what keeps you going."

History will be made today. Voters will either turn out a three-term incumbent or overwhelmingly give him the chance to be the longest-serving mayor in our very old town.

Maura Hennigan deserves endless praise for raising key issues, for holding Menino accountable, for giving us an election instead of a coronation. The city could do a lot worse than having her as mayor.

Still, 12 years in office, and Menino still takes the city personally. All in all, this is not a bad day for Boston.

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