{"id":3699,"date":"2013-04-22T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T16:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=3699"},"modified":"2013-04-21T21:54:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T01:54:34","slug":"i-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/i-3\/","title":{"rendered":"I <3 Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve written here\u00a0before<\/a>\u00a0about how Patriots Day, Marathon Monday, is the best day of the year to be a Bostonian. It is, it really is. I’m sitting here trying to think of a way to describe the energy downtown along the marathon route, and I don’t have adequate words for the task. It’s a joyful day, a positive day, a day when everyone is looking out for each other. Whole families trek down to Boylston Street to cheer for strangers. Everyone is laughing, cheering, smiling. It’s an entirely positive experience.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, in the face of unspeakable tragedy, people have the tendency to get a little bit maudlin, maybe overly sentimental, maybe even to start looking back on things with rose colored glasses. I can assure you, that is not the case here. Patriots Day and the Boston Marathon have always been a special day around these parts.<\/p>\n

Judging by the number of people who have written similar thoughts on Facebook, I’m not the only one who feels that way.<\/p>\n

My Mom usually watches our daughter on Mondays, but she was going to out of town, so I took the day off. I haven’t had Patriots Day off since I left academia, and I wanted an excuse to go downtown. I thought about getting Red Sox tickets. I had ambitions of cheering for a coworker who would be running the marathon. It was my favorite day of the year, and I wanted to share it with my daughter.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, Beans invited us to hang out with her and some friends instead. And I will be forever grateful to her for the invitation. Instead of going to downtown Boston, Lilian and I drove out to Concord to watch Revolutionary War reenactors carrying muskets and 4H girls in hoop skirts in the world’s most earnest parade. It wasn’t the marathon, but it was a very sweet morning.<\/p>\n

I thought about driving downtown after we left Concord, but I’d stubbed my toe the night before and it was still throbbing. For once in my life, I did the smart thing and went home.<\/p>\n

I have never been so happy to have tripped over my own feet.<\/p>\n

And I trip over my own feet a\u00a0lot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

LJ and I snuggled up on the living room floor and I absentmindedly glanced at Facebook on my iPhone. “Did anybody else hear a rumble downtown?” “Holy crap, what just happened?” “OMG, explosion at the marathon!” At first I thought it was a manhole cover or transformer blowing. It pretty quickly became clear that something horrible had happened. I turned on the TV and watched with horror as events unfolded. We’ve been fairly glued to the news media this past week.<\/p>\n

I’ve always been proud to be from Boston. Even when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Yankees. But Boston did itself proud on Monday. And I think we’ve done ourselves proud over the past week. I’ve seen a lot of hurt and anger, but I’ve also seen a lot of love and positivity. This entire city has really come together. We’ve reached out to each other. We’re taking care of each other.<\/p>\n

I love that Boston’s chief of police talked in a press conference about how we need to live our lives and not let fear turn our city into a police state. I love that Governor Patrick reminded everyone to avoid rushing to judgement, and to avoid stereotypes. I love that our focus has been on how we can honor the victims, help out the injured, and move forward.<\/p>\n

This past week has been insane. But I don’t feel like it’s “changed everything.” Boston is going to keep being Boston. Because that’s just what we do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written here\u00a0before\u00a0about how Patriots Day, Marathon Monday, is the best day of the year to be a Bostonian. It is, it really is. I’m sitting here trying to think…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[49,52,2,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beans","category-gummybear","category-random","category-running"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5yggS-XF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3699"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3704,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3699\/revisions\/3704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}