Take care

On Monday, I rode home from work on a crowded subway train, walked the short distance to my apartment, started a load of laundry. My husband sent a text message to say he was on his way home. I started a pot of water boiling for pasta, washed and chopped a few stalks of asparagus, grated a bit of Parmesan cheese. It all felt – dare I say it? – so normal.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t.

Farmers’ market tents in Copley Square

By now, most of the world has heard about the explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, which killed three people and injured more than 100 others. I would have been horrified to learn about this event if I still lived in Texas, or in England, or anywhere else. But for nearly three years, I have lived and worked in the Boston area.

Copley Square, the same patch of ground that hosts the finish line, is also the location of beautiful Trinity Church and my beloved Boston Public Library, and the farmer’s market I used to visit all the time. I have friends who work in the John Hancock Tower in the Square, and in a publisher’s office one block away. My former workplace, Emerson College, is five blocks from the blast site. I work in Cambridge now, across the river, but Boston is still my town. And that area is my neighborhood.

I am shocked, saddened, sick at heart, that someone chose to mar the most joyous day of the year in Boston – even if you’re not a runner (and I’m not), the city bubbles with excitement on Marathon Monday. This tragedy reminds me of Newtown and Aurora, of Columbine and 9/11 and Oklahoma City – and even the reminding makes me ache, because there should not be a long list of these events stretching back in my memory. Of all the words that occur to us at such a time, the phrase not again should absolutely not be among them.

Yet I am also humbled, by the dozens of text messages and emails and posts on social media sites, from people checking on me, and also on each other. It reminded me of the snowstorm this winter, when we lost power and my family and friends kept checking on us, and of the days after Hurricane Sandy, when, as Alyssa wrote so eloquently, people kept calling out to one another, via phone and email and the vast huddle of the Internet.

Are you okay? Were you anywhere near where it happened? Did you get home all right? Let us know. Be safe. Take care. We love you.

My mom and dad, my sister and my aunt, all in Texas. My friends from college and high school, scattered around the globe. My friend Allison in New York, who sent a text that read, “You and J are our Boston family.” My friend Abi, who lives across town and texted me to make sure I had gotten home safely, after her own ride home on a near-empty train. So many friends I’ve met online, but never in person, and friends I met online who have since become in-person friends. People I know from church and work back in Texas; family friends who have known me since I was born.

So much love, pouring through the electronic connections that bind us all together, however tenuously. I complain about social media as much as the next person, how it can devolve into banal oversharing or political shouting. But after a tragedy like this one, it’s where the huddle happens.

Let me say again: J and I are fine, and so far, so is everyone I know, though we will all be working through the shock and sadness for a while. And let me also say: thank you. Thank you for checking in on us; thank you for praying; thank you for caring. We are so grateful, and we love you back.

Take care.

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