Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

Monday afternoon around 5:45 pm I turned on NPR as I drove on 694 headed toward Bill Schmidt’s home.  It was mid-report on something that had happened in Boston, something important, so I stayed with the news.  At a recap I learned of the bombings during the 4 hour plus mark of the Boston Marathon.

I hollowed out and a sense of deep sadness raced in to fill the void.  The feelings from 9/11, not the event, but the feelings joined these.  Not anger.  Not bitterness.  Sadness and emptiness, a sudden vacuum in my interior world.

(Summer Evening, Hopper)

Then there was the ritual of repetitive reporting, the redundant witnesses, the guesses, the breathless commentary by this person and that one.  A reporter for Boston public radio said the Marathon would be forever marred.  And I thought, no.  No.  This will come to mind and it will be known as the work of an other and will not be allowed to mar the race, rather it will become part of the race’s history, its collective memory.

The most intense part of my initial reaction came when I realized what those feelings meant, the emptiness and the sadness and the vacuum.  They meant I am an American.  That this event was about us, was done to us.  Here, on a highway in the northern central part of our large country I felt violated and hit.  It makes me think of Lincoln’s line about the mystic chords of memory.  It was those chords that bomb caused to resonate.  It’s important, I think, to say out loud that those bonds make us strong and that it is good that we feel them.

It comes from the close of his 1st inaugural address:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”