It has always been special.

It’s spring!

It’s school vacation!

At dawn there’s a reenactment of the battle with the redcoats on Lexington Green!

At eleven in the morning there’s a Red Sox game!

And then there’s the marathon, where the best athletes in the world compete alongside your nephew, alongside the software developer who sits a hundred feet away from you.

I’ve been at the battle reenactment.  I’ve seen Bill Rodgers racing along Commonwealth Avenue towards the finish line.  I’ve ridden the T with the exhausted runners wearing their foil capes.

Now someone has taken it all away from us.  Now our son has to email us to say he and his friends are all right.  Now one of our editors has to text us that he left the finish line before it all happened.  The software developer reports that he and his wife and child were walking along Huntington Avenue when they heard the explosions, and suddenly everyone was running towards them and everything turned into chaos, but they’re safe at home now.

Everyone we know is okay.  But a wonderful part of our life has been taken away, and that is not okay.