Strength

I was there.  We were all there in the shrapnel of the moment when a bomb changed what we thought about life and perseverance.

When you grow up in New England, and specifically the birthplace of the Revolution, you can almost capture what it’s like to spend the late winter idling, waiting for your chance to walk again; to let go of everything you’ve been holding in.  Somehow over the years, we’ve taken the revolution part of Patriots Day for granted, but kept the Marathon as the enduring symbol of fighting against our various hardships.

Two years ago I drove down to Hopkinton and watched the race for the first time in person.  No one I knew personally was running that day, but I nestled myself shoulder to shoulder with people from all over the country trying to just get a glimpse of their loved one as they were pushed by in a warm breeze of runners.  You see the leaders, world-class, drafting the news cameras, too early in the race to take a human breath.  There are the people who dash year upon year whom we cherish as the pillars of the race, and the crowd crackles at the celebrity.  Then there are the smooth athletes who have come for the challenge.  Here comes Beth – everybody cheer!  Beth waves and smiles and the useless traffic lights keep changing as if they don’t know this is a glorious day when routine isn’t enough to get you comfortably over the finish line.

I had only known Beth and the thousands like her for twenty minutes or a half an hour.  There are so many faces and colors to those moments, I’m sure it doesn’t capture how good it feels to be baptized in that river of runners – for a few hours you are no longer that lonely runner challenging only the endurance of your own life as it struggles to meet your pace.  These are the people we want to succeed.  We want their stories to be whole with sacrifices, and physical pain, perseverance, and glory.  Let these people walk amongst us.

April 15th of last year was to stitch new tales of fighting everything to just get past that finish line to append to thick quilt of athletic success.  I had a friend who was running for the first time.  You wish that it was as easy as running after seagulls on the beach when you are a child, but when you have a family and job there is nothing simple.  At least for his wife she had gone into the center of Boston hundreds of times, and besides looking out for their kids in the thickly settled crowd, she didn’t have anything novel to spend much time thinking about.  It was a matter of time for both of them to reunite in a sweaty embrace, and talk about that Patriots Day for years to come.

The Boston Marathon is the one thing that ties us all together.  Everyone…EVERYONE who grew up here has either been to the Marathon or knows someone who has run it.  Most of us have walked on that sidewalk as if it were every other mile of our path in life.  There just can’t be another event on this earth that is so personal to so many.  If that pain and fear was isolated to that one place on that one day, we who watched from afar would be bystanders set to give our support to the victims, wondering just how scary and pathetic the scene was.  It was a community effort via Facebook, and phone, and internet to check on anyone who might have been involved with the race that day.  Fortunately my people were all safely accounted for.  People in the town I grew up in didn’t get the same assurance.  The day stretched on into a menacing reel of a movie.  That’s what many liken the aftermath to.

It’s human nature after a storm to shake your head over the damage and try to just start cleaning up.  That part of this tragedy is grasped well by people across the country and across the world.  What’s hard to comprehend is that the fear was allowed to linger on and to which none of us was a bystander.  First it was a witch hunt to uncover who caused this.  Of course the criminal would go on the run – danger was certainly in another town far from Boston.  Yet, the spider was hovering over us the whole time.    So you’re locked into the news while trying to sort out what happened.  Then there is the shooting at MIT scrolling across the screen, and all your brain can connect is every other school shooting.  You wonder why is this all happening.  You would have thought the training wheels might have fallen off after 9-11, but you want to believe America is still too powerful to let things run rampant.  Soon the clarification that it is these same guys percolates the fear that your beliefs might be a tissue paper shield.

Friday madness is on the run.  They designed death and they killed in cold blood…and nobody is sure where they are.  I was sitting in my house, the very same spot I’m in right now, watching the news, hoping my wife at work is far enough away from all of this.  Now, it’s a certainty that this guy could be creeping through my neighborhood capable of anything to survive.  When he was discovered later that day, the Watertown neighborhood where bullets were flying wasn’t much different than where I lived.

Tragedy seemed to be over, with the absurd bookend of the same people who watched the race on Monday now cheering and high-fiving the SWAT people and EMS workers.  Our eyes finally could tend to the wounds that were everywhere.

I can’t remember where the term “Boston Strong” actually came from.  It’s become so definite in this area, though it was probably ripping off some fleeting mantra of the past.  I shouldn’t bristle when I see it used in some other part of the country for their local situations, but I do. As tightly as Boston Strong has wrapped us all together to watch the progression of the healing of the victims, the mourning for those who can’t be replaced by science, the certification of our communities and enforcement agencies, and the pride of delivering another marathon next Monday, things may loosen eventually.  I will be pleased to ride the tidings of goodwill out as long I can knowing even those of us who felt insignificant in this whole event do add up to something.

The more you peel back the layers of this Boston Strong resume, you start to realize what a unique place we have and that strength has long been in our DNA.  May it never change.