Monday, April 15, 2019

Through the City's Melted Furnace

Someone told me years ago that the older you get the faster the days seem to go by. As I close in on the successful completion of my sixty-seventh orbit around the sun I am reminded of the truth of that observation more with each passing day. 

I am sometimes surprised to be confronted by a calendar telling me something is happening that I promised myself I would never forget but I have. I hope we're all like that and wish we weren't, most especially the latter part. 

The bombing at the Boston Marathon, an integral part of that city's Patriots' Day celebration was six years ago. Martin Richard would be just about ready for, if not already in, high school. But his song ended almost at the same moment it began. 

When I first wrote this I called it:     

The Telling Never Changes the Tale

I wrote this years ago because there was nothing else to write that day but the words of the next paragraphs. And here we are another year on, and no sense still makes no sense and good and decent people still have holes in their hearts where their loved ones used to be.

Today is Patriots' Day in Massachusetts and also the traditional running of the Boston Marathon. That order of precedence, if you will, was altered and changed for forever because of circumstances officially recalled in this news account on the one year anniversary of a day that we all now recall.

In 2013 at the Boston Marathon, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev those evil, ungrateful bastards whom we took in and who repaid that kindness with killing innocents, broke hearts, destroyed lives and shattered our national illusion of insularity and insulation from the other horrors of the rest of the world and altered forever anyone's memories and imaginings of the Boston Marathon.

Both brothers will be long faded from memory before what they did is forgotten, but better remembered, and hopefully always remembered, is what they failed to do. Just ask Jeff Baumann, who gets stronger every day and whom I fervently hope gets angry and powerful enough some day to kick the ass of Dzorkhar all the way to Boston Harbor and then hold him under until the bubbles stop.

I understand being an angry old man will get me nothing but an even more premature grave and I should take my cue from those who not only survived but triumphed over the tragedy of that day. Perhaps I shall, starting tomorrow.

No More Hurting People
I have the good fortune to have as a Facebook friend, a Fenway habitue  and Grammy-nominee, who spent a lot of years on the Jersey Shore and has now followed the advice of Horace Greeley and gone west, Linda Chorney, who repurposed and molded her sorrow to create a beautiful celebration of a life taken terribly, suddenly and far too soon into a song perfectly suited for today and all those who are enjoying it.
-bill kenny

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