Running

A Saudi National was running from a bomb that exploded in the middle of a crowd and he was tackled and questioned for it.  He is cooperative and scared and tackled.  I saw a photo of a man who was injured.  I was warned, by the Atlantic twitter feed, that it was graphic and I am haunted and horrified for that man who was being carried by three others because his legs were gone, one of the merely injured.There is one official feed of the explosion that keeps running on the air.  It's the one where the 78 year old man falls down just before the finish line.  I had seen him 30 minutes earlier on Beacon Street.  I cheered for him from the street.  I smiled at his speed and his commitment to the work of it.  Now I can't stop watching him fall.

Marathon Monday

I like to celebrate Patriots' Day in Boston.  I hop off the T at Park Street and avoid the crowds and chaos of the Green Line by walking through the Commons.  Today, like every year, there was a hint of Spring in the air.  55 degrees, after this winter, felt like a promise of summer.  There were buskers playing Lady Gaga on violins.  At the foot of Boylston, there were busses well organized by numbers with BAA bags inside, numbers like 9500-9800.  Numbers that identified the runners so they would be able to reconnect with their stuff and their people when they were finished running. The kinds of numbers and organization that had my sister remark, "It's almost like they know how to do this; like they've done it before."  There were smiling police officers, college students who were unfortunate enough to be fashion concious in a retro-80s time warp, there were people in unbelivably good shape, smokers, people who had drinken too much beer, and folks who were jogging in training for something else. There were students who greeted me by name, families who were seeing Boston for the first time.  I felt that joy on Boylston, on Comm Ave, on Beacon, that kind of joy of bearing witness to the grit and determination of 78 year olds running easily at mile 25, of people who worked through blizzards all summer just so they could still be standing at mile 26, marines who ran carrying an American flag with its heavy pole still hupping at mile 24.  There is a relationship between the runners and the watchers.  I watch and yell, I applaud and appreciate and I get to feel, somehow, like I have helped him or her take that difficult step and make that difficult decision to keep running.  I watch them and am amazed to the point of yelling, and that yelling seems to bring a smile, a pep in the step of gratitude.  There's a buoying of spirit that seems, somehow, mutual.  There is something we like about being able to help.  Of knowing that our presence might just have made a small difference.  I like to think, and somehow I know it's true, that my small voice in the crowd of half a million does help the runners in front of me keep on keeping on.  It reminds me of how many likes I got on facebook when I typed the simple sentence "The Smith siblings are safe and accounted for." Four of us watched the runners together, and one kept us all informed about what was happening, and one gave me a ride home, south on 93 and we watched 20 staties driving North on 93 to the city and it made us feel safer and unsettled simultaneously. And there are all of these people who like that we are safe and accounted for, and there is  a buoying of spirit in the way that we witness and appreciate each other that keeps our hearts from hardening even if the images of the day are gruesome.