tragedy in Boston

Boston is my second home.  I have friends and family there.  I lived there both before college, during college, and after college.  I moved to Chicago, and came back to Boston after graduate school.    I lived in an apartment in the heart of Back Bay, on Exeter Street, between Boylston and Newbury.  $650/month (a lot for 1981) for  a nice one bedroom in the most idyllic part of town.  That was today’s site for two bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  Three people died (including an 8-year old boy) and over 170 were injured (many seriously).  It reminds me of New York after 911.  Abandoned streets.  Closed airports.  Sirens everywhere.  People dazed.  Subways shut town.  Cell phones not working.  People scared, wondering what’s next.

The scope of the tragedy in Boston is different than 911, but the immense sadness of a city mourning is not.

A friend from Boston writes:

The whole mess started at about 3:00p.m..  The 1st explosion was on Boylston St. across from the BPL.  The 2nd explosion occurred 1 block away on Boylston St. close to Fairfield St.  Both explosions happened 1 block from your old apt. on Newbury St. & Exeter St.  We were out watching the marathon in another area but boy oh boy were people spooked

Sad, all very sad.

The neighborhood is closed to traffic for about a 15 block radius.  It should all open up late tonight or in the early morning.  As I sit in our home I hear sirens, and helicopters.

To quote VP JB, "This is a big f&^%^&g deal."

Another friend writes:

I just got back from taking A’s friend to a medical facility.  She was at the finish line waiting for her daughter to cross when the bomb went off.  She got deep lacerations on both legs and also suffered hearing loss.  She witnessed a man whose two legs blew off.  She saw a foot in the street.  Just the foot.  She tended to a woman with a deep “hole” in her leg.  Awful.  Awful.  At the doctor’s this morning, another woman walked in.  She has remnants of the bomb still in her brain.

H’s friend’s sister is one of the 8 critically injured at Mass General Hospital.  She is in a medically induced coma.  They are trying to save her legs.

It’s a war zone here.  Streets are roped off as crime scenes.  Flags are at half mast.  The police are saying there are more bombs out there.

I’ve never been scared like this.

I become glued to the news.  It is hard to imagine.  You go out to watch a race and you lose your limbs, or worse. 

In the book I just finished (This Is Where I Leave You), the protagonist says,

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we’ve got the world on a string.  If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we’d never leave our bedrooms.

All those clichés about appreciating what you have, living each day to the fullest, blah blah blah?  They are all true. 

It’s a dangerous world we live in.