I'm sitting here, welling with gladness. The tragedies of this week that those two fools perpetrated upon the people of my city have been the catalyst for a minor emotional restoration for me. It's reawakened my dormant sense of passionate attachment to this place, New England, my home.
I've been sitting here today thinking how Boston somehow oddly belongs to me, even though I've never lived there. It's like this: when I am away from home, very few people know where Maine is. Hardly anybody's heard of New England. Foreigners tend not to know all that much about the States. I usually have a slight problem when people ask me, as they often do, what part of America I am from.
My simple solution: I always tell them I am from Boston. Often that draws a blank, too. At which point I just say that it's sorta like New York, only wicked awesome. That last part's impossible to translate into French or Spanish, so I'll interject the English then fudge translate (bien chouette, demasiado chido, algo y nada como esto..) No way they could possibly understand, it always makes me laugh.
Sometimes I'll add another incomprehensible line about Boston being the hub around all known creation radiates (le centre autour qui orbite tout le reste de l'univers connu, el centro acerca todo el resto del universo orbita - just watch the linguistic ginsu master, how I roll).. I get on a slight comedic bend, and crack myself all up while the person who asked stares at me wondering what's wrong with the crazy damn gringo.
Anyway, I am somehow actually in fact from Boston. Because as anyone from Maine will tell you, going Down East is coming from Boston. That's how you go to get there from here, across the Gulf of Maine.
What's more, we were once politically - until 1820 - part of Massachusetts. And to this day Boston's teams - the Sox, Patriots, Bruins, Celtics - are our teams. That's called belonging to something in your blood and guts. From the sea and soil. Blood, salt and dirt.. Family. Boston is our town.
In my mind's eye I see the skyline of the city shimmering up from the inrushing tarmaced horizon of I 93 flowing toward us, the very first time my dad and mom took my brothers and me into the city back in 1980. We sat in the backseat of the stationwagon, I utterly entranced by the mystical majesty of those two clusters of towers thrusting high into the hazy summer sky.
Dad took us to Jacob Wurth's by Tufts, where he hung out in his graduate school days at B.U. The fat white shirted mustachioed German waiters kicking sawdust as they brought us our platonically delectable bratwurst and sauerkraut..
It was a love affair from the very beginning. All the graceful intimacy of the town, colonial class of Fennel Hall and the golden capitol dome, with the Aquarium & Old Ironsides hedging the Harbor throwing off briny mist, to Fenway and the Charles so storied, all democratically regal..
Which is merely to say the horror of the week has been unrolling across terrain I know. Places I often inhabit in my dreams. Boyleston Street. Cambridge. Kenmore Square.
I'm still riding this train, see, after all these years.. Florida could never keep me:
Tonight I again find myself patriotically emotional in ways I haven't been in years. The last decade has been very harsh on my patriotic feeling. I'm still ferociously patriotic. This country, this land, is my home. These are my people. My heart's not going anywhere, even if I happen to be physically abroad. But these past years my heart's become pretty well bruised and cynical. The love's intact, but the adolescent magic was gone. I've come to know too much, have been repeatedly disappointed.
But now tonight, on Patriot's Day, the anniversary of the shot heard 'round the world, the old ferocious emotion floods back.
They finally got that knucklehead.
Not even news of Lindsay Grahm spouting the now all too trite quasi- fascist Republican idiocy assaulting our precious constitutional tradition of due process, once again whyping his nasty southern ass with the Bill of Rights, like those jack booted thugs have been compulsively for the past twelve years now can damp my happiness.
How was it that I ever allied myself with those assholes, thinking that they were somehow pro-life? Like they actually care about the unborn. Was I an idiot? Was there crack in our water supply back then? Why doesn't Lindsay and the rest of his gibbering cracker horde just succeed again, and leave us Yankees alone? Why was it we fought so damn hard to keep them last time? I have no idea.
Whatever. My contempt for them knows no end. They call themselves patriots. Cretinous fuckers. Go fellate some more bankers. Put their plugs in your gobs like good little kept catamites. I have no more patience for your bullshit.
The people of Boston just put you all to shame. This week has been a minor epic, I felt like I was watching the boys form up on the green again, staring down Gage's thugs with calm defiance.
No pathetic would-be terrorist is going to scare us. They only succeed if they terrorize us. They failed.
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| Their flag to April's breeze unfurled.. |
The character of free men is defined in the conquest of fear, see.
Two hundred and thirty eight years ago today, on April 19th 1775, the people of New England faced down the forces of a foreign tyrant, and won our freedom.
Tonight we triumphed once again. God Bless Boston. God Bless America.
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Amen.
ReplyDeleteI'm not "from Boston" either, but I am. I was born elsewhere and lived elsewhere until I was 45; I've lived in New England for 15 years. Even now I'm not "from Boston" living as I do in an outer suburb on the 495 loop.
But this is my home now, and I am feeling the same emotions that you are. God bless Boston -- my town.