Boston: “It’s our hometown”

[DonViejo]

It's been a decade since I lived there, but I've never felt more like a Bostonian than I do right now

BY STEVE KORNACKI

I had just hung up with my uncle, whose son works as a manager at a hotel across the street from one of the explosions, when my friend’s text came in: “It’s our hometown. It’s our race.”

That’s not technically true. We both grew up in the suburbs, and neither of us has lived in Massachusetts for a decade. Nor were we ever full-fledged residents of the city – just college kids at BU (and for a few months after that, unemployed BU grads). But for the first 22 years of our lives – the 22 years that shaped us into who and what we are today – our world revolved around Boston. And many of the people and many of the memories that mean the most to us are still there. The farther our lives have taken us from it, the more it’s come to feel like home.

So as I processed the horrifying images and read the chilling and heart-breaking accounts, there was an added rawness to my grief, an extra intensity to my rage. I knew exactly what my friend meant. I felt like punching something. I wanted to know who did it, and for them to pay. I wanted to be the one who made them pay.

That it was Patriots’ Day somehow made it feel worse. Boston is both a world-class city, home to some of the best academic and medical institutions on the planet, and a quirkily parochial place, where one of the biggest annual sporting events involves college hockey players competing for a beanpot and where generations of baseball fans actively believed they were victims of a curse. Patriots’ Day is the essence of Boston, a Massachusetts-only holiday that seems like it was invented to celebrate Boston. The finest runners in the world are joined by thousands of local amateurs for the marathon. The Red Sox play an annual game at 11:15 in the morning. Schools are closed, bars are open. The streets are filled with people who are just a little friendlier, just a little warmer than usual, as if they’re contemplating how lucky they are to be in the one city in America where it’s not just another workday.

-snip-

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/its_our_hometown/

[woofless]

1. We left Boston nearly 50 years ago when I was twelve.

It will ALWAYS be home.