At home in the arena

The mayor shakes hands. He studies the work. He snaps off wisecracks and ticks off drawbacks. An unsightly “No Trespassing’’ sign needs to be removed. A basketball court is unevenly paved. A tree has withered branches that need trimming. A rusty fence needs repainting. He gives commands. His aides take notes. They promise improvements.

A group of second-graders begins a performance, “Dance of the Old Men.’’ Menino, 66, seeking an unprecedented fifth term as mayor of Boston, stands without expression in the center of the cheering crowd and cavorting children.

This is Menino, the energetic populist, the hands-on urban mechanic with his finger on the pulse of each neighborhood and each city project. This is Menino, the autocratic despot in the eyes of his critics. But more than anything else, this is Menino, the aging politician on the trail of yet another campaign, an overweight guy with Crohn’s disease and a bum knee facing 18-hour days and a barrage of headlines he would rather not read.

The children stop dancing. Everyone applauds except the mayor, who appears lost in thought. Carol R. Johnson, superintendent of the Boston public schools, tells the crowd about a sixth-grader at the school who has hugged the mayor each year since she was 5. The girl, Rossangel Fernandez, walks up to the mayor and stares at him. The mayor stares back. He gamely gives her the seventh hug. The crowd cheers and the mayor poses for pictures.

This is Menino in 2009, sixteen years in office, just days away from his potential reelection Nov. 3. The prizefighter may have lost a step, but he still knows the moves. He is still the favorite, with a commanding 52 percent to 32 percent lead over his challenger, Councilor at Large Michael F. Flaherty Jr., according to the latest Globe poll. published Oct. 17.

He says he still wants it. Specifically, riding in his Chevrolet Tahoe hybrid after the event, he says, “I’m not good looking, I can’t speak well, I’m not smart. I’m driven. Friends ask me: ‘Why do you need this? You can go out on top.’ ’’

He pauses, and answers their question: “I have the opportunity to change people’s lives.’’

The way to do it, the mayor says, is to embrace any and all of his constituents. No one should feel like an outcast in the city of Boston, “sea of Boston’’ is how it comes out when the mayor says it, which he often does.

The mayor looks to find common ground with anyone he meets. Say you live in Plymouth, and the mayor recalls his trips to White Horse Beach as a child. Say you are a Sox fan, and the mayor has the team’s logo on his cellphone wallpaper and finishes public appearances with a hearty “go Sox’’ (until they get eliminated). The mayor sees a basketball court, and he recalls playing there as a youth. He sees a restaurant, and he tells how he met with neighborhood businessmen there the other night (“I don’t know what I ate, but it was good’’).

It is Darlene Harrison, a mother of seven who overcame drug and alcohol abuse, earned a high school diploma, and got a job at a hospital. Menino attended her graduation in 2003.

“I definitely want to campaign for you,’’ Harrison says.

“She’s a superstar,’’ says the mayor.

Menino gets accolades for being all things to everyone. But it also means everyone wants something from him.

Inside, he wraps up his cautionary tale about insurance agents and opens up the floor to questions. There are many.

One of the seniors complains about the difficulty crossing Dorchester Avenue and asks what he can do about it. The street is being fixed up, promises the mayor, and “is going to be a real beautiful boulevard when we get done.’’

There is graffiti on the building’s wall. “We’ll take care of that,’’ declares the mayor.

Prostitutes are taking their customers behind the hedges by the fence, a man cries out. “We’ll talk with the captain,’’ says the mayor.

We used to have a Bradlees on the corner, says a woman. Why can’t we bring it back?

“That’s not gonna happen,’’ Menino states flatly. Even this mayor cannot resuscitate a defunct department store chain.

It is time to go.

“He should come here more often,’’ observes one resident, Ruby Haefner. “Livens up the place.’’

In the Tahoe, Menino reflects on his performance. They want a department store, and he cannot just give them one. There are leases to negotiate, parking to find, merchants to lure.

“Part of the job is being a good listener and trying to accommodate people as best you can,’’ he says. “You’re not gonna hit a home run every time.’’

The mayor chooses the Dry Dock Cafe in South Boston. “Best fish in Boston,’’ he says.

Menino likes fish. He likes talking about fish. Over the course of the day, he recalls how his uncle owned a business that built boats in Scituate and the young Menino used to row around the harbor. He went deep sea fishing once with John Hannah, the former New England Patriots offensive lineman, and did not catch anything.

“We should have a deep sea fishing derby in Boston Harbor,’’ muses Menino during lunch.

“We ought to have a fish farm in Boston harbor,’’ he opines.

Tilapia is the mayor’s favorite fish; his wife lightly breads it and bakes it. But it’s not on the menu. The mayor asks for a tuna fish sandwich.

After all that, no fresh fish?

“I got an event tonight,’’ he says. “I have to watch what I eat.’’

The agenda of the mayor of Boston is slightly more down-to-earth. He rarely misses a ribbon-cutting. As easily as he mixes with ordinary folk, he shmoozes with the powerful. It is just as important, he says after a lengthy tour of a $50 million renovation at Gillette’s World Shaving Headquarters in South Boston: “My bottom line is Gillette is a world headquarters. I gotta serve them.’’

Menino does not miss a chance to note accomplishments great and small. As he travels the city, he points at things and describes his role: He made the Boston Public Library put in a wheelchair-accessible entrance; he helped found Camp Harbor View, which serves hundreds of disadvantaged children; he started removing soft drink vending machines from public schools; speaking of schools, 75 in Boston have new playgrounds; he has launched programs to stem violence, programs to put kids to work, programs to synchronize school curricula with library offerings.

He discusses these feats in the first person singular.

“I own that building.’’

“I built that.’’

“It was contaminated, and I cleaned it up.’’

Officials have caught on. In the “sea of Boston,’’ Menino is the biggest fish.

Outdoor classrooms, a design that allows students to sit among rocks and plant beds as they learn? “The mayor came up with it,’’ says his education advisor, Martha Pierce. The extension of the Silver Line to South Station? “The mayor made it a priority,’’ says the state’s outgoing secretary of transportation, James A. Aloisi Jr.

As the SUV zips through the city, the mayor bristles at the suggestion that his approach smacks of an enlightened dictatorship.

He redirects his driver: “Let’s go look at the library.’’

The library is a sparkling new facility in Mattapan, built on previously contaminated land that the city cleaned up (“They gave it to me,’’ Menino says). It has high ceilings and large windows. Brand-new computers line attractive blond wood tables.

“It’s a great library,’’ Menino says, flipping through texts that prepare students for entry into various vocations. “This is most of what I do as mayor. This is what I enjoy. This is the fun stuff.’’

There is a black Epiphone Special Model electric guitar, a gift from Steven Tyler of the rock group Aerosmith (the mayor does not play). There is a painting outside depicting the mayor’s grandfather against a split-scene backdrop; on the left is the Boston skyline, on the right, the southern Italian village of Grottaminarda, from which he emigrated in the early 1900s. There is a huge collection of table clocks given as gifts from luminaries around the world.

Angela Menino sits among these things and considers the future of the man she married 43 years ago.

“The passion’s still there,’’ she says. “He’s never gotten up in the morning and said, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore.’ He always says. ‘I have the best job in America.’ ’’

That made the decision that he should run again, she says, “a no-brainer; this is what he needs to do.’’

Angela Menino is there when the mayor wakes up at 4:30 a.m. She is there when he fumes over the daily papers.

Sometimes, she makes him his favorite breakfast, oatmeal with blueberries (“They have a lot of antioxidants’’). She keeps busy during the day: She serves on various commissions, does contract work for John Hancock, tends to their home in Hyde Park, and often joins him at evening events.

They had a date night in late August or early September (neither remembers): They saw “Jersey Boys’’ at the Wang Theater. They go to bed by 10:30 p.m.

They hate it when their two adult children (and six grandchildren) are in the news.

“My children were never elected,’’ Angela Menino snaps. “Tommy’s the mayor.’’

Asked if the couple ever get tired of the public life, she shakes her head, as does the mayor, who has just entered the office through his private elevator from his private parking space.

“Both of us need kind of a purpose in life,’’ she says.

He is touring the East Boston Greenway, a linear park of flowers, green grass, bike trails, and playgrounds that, when it is completed, will connect Piers Park to Belle Isle Marsh. It is a classic project for Menino’s “sea of Boston.’’

To view the greenway, he is sitting behind the wheel of an E-Z-GO golf cart, because his host, Valerie Burns, president of the nonprofit Boston Natural Areas Network, does not drive.

Burns, coincidentally, is at the center of the controversy over how City Hall handles its e-mail records; in one of the messages unearthed since the story broke, one member of Menino’s administration writes to another: “TMM blew up Valerie Burns today.’’ As such, she is also at the epicenter of the discussion of the mayor’s temperamental ways and intolerance of dissent. Burns is not a city employee, but a loyal activist.

At this private meeting, Burns and Menino play down the episode. “We had one disagreement,’’ the mayor says.

The cart purrs down the greenway. Burns points out day lilies and water fountains, murals rather than graffiti on underpass walls, and a bocce field. Aides say the mayor wins tournaments in this most Italian of pastimes.

“Beep beep,’’ Menino says as the cart passes a citizen. “Hello,’’ says the citizen.

A woman flags down the cart.

“I need a sign for my building,’’ she says. “Then everyone on my street will see that I’m for you.’’

The mayor motions for an aide to take down her name and address.

Burns points out a blemish on this bucolic scene: billboards that tower over the strip of green, casting unseemly shadows on the day lilies. One features a colorful ad for Jamaica: Gridlock to sunblock in two hours or less, it promises.

“What kind of park has billboards?’’ Burns asks. Trouble is, neither billboards nor the property they’re on, belong to the city.

“I’ll make some calls,’’ Menino says as he steers the E-Z-GO. “I’ll use the bully pulpit.’’

With that, he hits the gas. There are other places he needs to be in the “sea of Boston.’’

Editor's note: Because of a production problem, some early editions of the Globe failed to include several paragraphs of the Page One story on Mayor Thomas Menino.