Here is son number two celebrating his 21st birthday:
So I guess we’re all done with parenting now, right?
Okay, maybe not.
At any rate, it seems to me that, to a parent, your child is a bit like a palimpsest: beneath the current surface are all the other layers of his life, visible only to you. So beneath that smiling adult face I still see this guy:
And this guy:
. . . and a million others in between.
Happy birthday, Mark!
What’s been happening in your corner of the world?
There is white-cap guy, apparently — sans backpack, turning the corner from Boylston onto Fairfield after the explosion.
I worked for a decade on the corner of Beacon and Fairfield, four blocks away. I can’t tell you how many times I saw this view, looking up Beacon Street towards the Lenox Hotel.
It’s not going to be easy to get over this.
The Bruins-Sabres game is the first professional sports event in Boston since the Marathon. Here is the National Anthem sung before the game. Rene Rancourt has been singing the anthem for the Bruins for about a hundred years. This time, he sings a few bars, and then lets the crowd take over.
Watch the guy wiping tears away just before the 2:00 mark.
Bruins lead 2-1 after the second period.
Stories from the folks at work today (with names redacted).
From a woman whose son ran:
What started off a beautiful day turned out surreal and frightening beyond belief. I was at the finish line to watch my son who was running for Mass Mentoring. At that time, the runners were charity runners. I was happy that I found a front row spot right at the street barricade on boylston between lord and taylor and the Lenox Hotel. The two bombs exploded right in front of us, at street level, one to the right and one to the left. We could see people falling and injured , and as the crowds ran to the middle of the street, we were left staggering in the middle of boylston street not knowing where to go and afraid that another bomb would go off. We also could not find family members. There was no way to call anyone, but my husband climbed a pole and found me and then we found my daughter in law who had been on the bleachers. but still no clue where my son was. He was 3/4 of a mile from the finish line when they stopped the race. Luckily some kind college students took him into their building and gave him a plastic blanket and some water and the use of their cell phone. We retrieved him from 400 comm ave and walked to Brookline. We waited for transport home. Thankfully we are all safe, but so very sad that some people who were standing not too far from me have been hurt or worse.
From a guy whose wife’s cousin was running:
I drove to MIT and walked over the bridge into Back Bay to guide my (wife’s) cousin and her husband back to my car. This was her second Boston Marathon. Due to some cramping, she was running behind her target pace, which is a good thing. Her target time would have put her at the finish line when the blasts occurred. Instead, her race ended at Mass Ave. From there she walked off the course and down to the Public Garden area to meet her husband.
She is full of praise for the residents of Boston, the race fans, and the other runners. While people at the blast site were understandably shocked, confused, and frightened, in the surrounding blocks the prevailing mood was one of calm, competent support and care. One resident came out of her apartment and handed her a thick comforter to keep warm in, asking only that she leave it on her stoop later if it was convenient, or just keep it if not. This was not an isolated event, as residents throughout the area offered food, water, warmth, phones, and the like to anyone in need. I spoke with a number of runners as I walked to the corner of Berkeley and Commonwealth. They were sad, and caring for each other, exchanging what news they had, and universally determined to run the next marathon to keep the bastards from winning.
From what I saw, law enforcement was firm yet polite about controlling the boundaries of the secured area, and as helpful as they could be given the circumstances and their necessary priorities. Since I wasn’t trying to get into the controlled area (few if any people seemed to be doing that), I walked mostly on Marlborough, a few blocks away or on Commonwealth Ave, and so can’t say anything about the immediate scene of the bombing. But from what I saw in the neighborhood, we should be proud to live and work near such a great city. These are good people. who rise to face down the worst, and to help each other.
From one of our editors:
I was standing in front of LensCrafters, just a couple of doors down from Marathon Sports, where the first bomb went off. Fortunately, my buddy and I took a break for lunch about 1/1:30 and then left that area around 2/2:30. The bomb went off at 2:50.
He was in Harvard Square when I texted him to see if he was okay. He had no idea what had happened. He was able to respond to me; soon his phone was lighting up with texts, but the network was overloaded and he couldn’t respond. He listened to the events on the radio at a newsdealer in the Square for a while and ran into a Kenyan runner who had finished the race, and then for some unknown reason decided to run the five miles or so to Harvard Square after the bombs went off. Very strange.
Here is a jersey hanging in the Red Sox dugout tonight; 617 is the Boston area code:
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.
When Harvard’s basketball team unexpectedly won its first-round game in the NCAA tournament, the Harvard Lampoon sent out this apologetic tweet:
America, we are sorry for messing up your brackets and also your financial system and everything else.
— Harvard Lampoon (@harvardlampoon) March 22, 2013
“Everything else” apparently includes the lack of miracles in modern America. Here is Pat Robertson:
Why do miracles “happen with great frequency in Africa, and not here in the USA?” asked a 700 Club patron Ken. “People overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools,” Robertson replied with a chuckle.
“We are so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out,” the Christian Broadcasting Network chairman continued. “We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real, we know about all this stuff.”
According to Robertson, it’s the “skepticism and secularism” that is being taught at “the most advanced schools” around the country that is keeping God’s miracles at bay.
Meanwhile, Africans are “simple” and “humble.” “You tell ‘em God loves ‘em and they say, ‘Okay, he loves me’,” said Robertson. “You say God will do miracles and they say, ‘Okay, we believe him’.”
If Harvard and those other snooty places had only disappeared, maybe we’d be seeing Florida Gulf Coast in the Final Four.
Provincetown is quiet in March. Most of the shops and art galleries don’t open till May, and many of the hotels are closed, as well. Why go there?
My lovely wife and I go there because that’s where we spent our honeymoon, back in the McKinley administration, or maybe it was the Garfield administration; it’s hard to keep administrations straight after a while. We were broke, and Provincetown in March was about all we could afford. So for us, a visit there is about memory as much as it is about sightseeing.
Here is the Provincetown War Memorial, with the Pilgrim Monument in the background:
The Pilgrims stopped at Provincetown before making their way to Plymouth. It was here they wrote the Mayflower Compact. So, in a sense, the idea of America was born in Provincetown. I’m pretty sure the Pilgrims wouldn’t have approved of many of the denizens of modern P’town; but then, I wouldn’t have approved of the Pilgrims.
Here’s Commercial Street, which will be so crowded in July you won’t be able to breathe. March is the time to get the streets and sidewalks repaved:
Here is the Town Landing, with one wrecked little boat lying in the sand:
And here is the scene at Herring Cove Beach, look off towards Race Point Light (I think).
We pretty much had the place to ourselves. Which was fine by us.
Coincidences don’t have much of a place in fiction, as I tried to explain in this post. But surely they have a place in life. After listening to the This American Life podcast about coincidences, I tried to think of any of them in my life. Couldn’t come up with any. But then…
Two nights ago my wife and I were watching a bit of a James Taylor/Carole King special on TV, and at the same time I was reading Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue. Carole King starts to sing “It’s Too Late,” a song that was everywhere in the early 70s but that I haven’t thought about in decades. And at the same moment I start reading a passage in Telegraph Avenue that describes a memorial service for a recently deceased black jazz organist where “It’s Too Late” is played; turns out this was his signature tune.
The next day I was reading the news about the FBI knowing who stole the paintings from the Gardner Museum 23 years ago. Then I returned to Telegraph Avenue, and sure enough:
He remembered taking Julie to the Gardner Museum on a trip to Boston a few years earlier, seeing a rectangle of paler wallpaper against the time-aged wall where a stolen Rembrandt once hung, a portrait of the very thing that perched atop the stool where Mr. Jones [the dead organist] used to sit: emptiness itself.
Those coincidences certainly aren’t good enough to get me on This American Life. But they’re odd and somehow meaningful, at least to me. They entwine my life and experiences with those of Michael Chabon and his characters. I’ve heard that Carole King song countless times. I have stared at the wall in the Gardner where the Rembrandt used to hang. It’s all connected,
So now I’m going to entwine you. Here’s the song, sung with James Taylor in the documentary I was watching while reading Telegraph Avenue:
Here’s the stolen Rembrandt:
And here’s the empty space where it used to hang, not exactly as Chabon described it, but close enough:
By the way, if you happen to know where that painting is, please let the FBI know. I’d love to see it again.
I don’t know anything about photography, but there are some images I just can’t stop staring at. There are lots of those among the finalists for the Smithsonian’s 10th annual photocontest.
Here’s a gorilla photographed at the Bronx Zoo by Vanessa Bartlett:
Here’s a kitchen in an abandoned home, photographed by Cleat Walters:
Go there and vote for your favorite! The current leader is this photo of someone watching a solar eclipse, taken by Colleen Pinski:
Richard Bowker 