I had a hard time sitting down to write this post. I have no desire to trivialize the horror of what happened at the Boston Marathon, the terror that engulfed a great city, the subsequent assassination of an MIT policeman, and the shootout that ultimately led to the death of one of the bombing suspects and the capture of his younger brother. But I am drawn once again by the intersection of events in my life and that of our family with news of the day, so I’ve, reluctantly, pieced together some Beantown memories.
I’ve been to Boston many times, for work and to visit family. My first visit to Boston, to attend the deciding game of the 1975 World Series, predates the ritual singing of Sweet Caroline at Fenway Park. It was not sweet that night for Red Sox fans. They blew a lead to the Cincinnati Reds. The city had to wait another 19 years for its championship rings.
Our family has walked down Boylston Street where the bombs went off several times. We’ve stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in the Prudential Center that backs up on Boylston. We’ve shopped in the Prudential Center mall. The June before Dan entered Tufts University, we bought him a Columbia Sportswear winter jacket. In truth, it was too big for him (too big for me, as well), but he wanted it and it was on sale. He gave it back to me several years later and I used it from time to time. Last year I gave it to one of Donny’s friends who needed a winter jacket while riding around as a bicycle messenger.
I think it was during that same June visit that Ellie talked us into taking a horse drawn carriage ride around Copley Square. Her vision—all of our visions—of a carriage ride as a romantic excursion was forever destroyed that night. It’s hard to feel romantic when your olfactory sense is assaulted by the contents of the drop bag behind the horse. We couldn’t wait for the ride to finish.
Dan and Allison bought a house in Arlington seven years ago. One of the restaurants in town we ate in during our first visit was Jimmy’s Steer House on Massachusetts Avenue. She didn’t work there then, but Krystle Campbell, one of the three fatalities of the marathon day bombing, worked as a manager of Jimmy’s for the last several months.
Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was captured in Watertown, in the yard of 67 Franklin Street, less than a mile from the Arsenal Mall. Fifteen years ago I spent time at the Arsenal Mall researching a cover story for my magazine.
Mostly inconsequential links. But sufficiently strong, to me, to have made me identify a little stronger than most non-Bostonians with the utter senselessness of the last two weeks. I’ve left it to other journalists to be more profound about the meaning behind our latest bout with terror.
