Were We Safer?

Thursday was one of those seemingly perfect days.  If memory serves me, we used to get a lot of days like that “back in the day.”

The sun was bright and with each day seems increasingly stronger. There was a breeze with just a hint of a chill and the sky was that kind of blue that is almost impossible to describe to someone who has never seen it like that. Blessedly, the bugs, some that almost seem the size of Pterodactyls have not yet claimed what they feel is their rightful place.

It seemed a good day to reflect on the tragedy that unfolded last week in Boston, an event that will forever color the Boston Marathon and the free and glorious spirit it has embodied for more than a century. Yes it will go on and we’ll not let another act of violence destroy this wonderful tradition because we are resilient but a bit of innocence was forever eradicated

As I often do when I feel reflective, I walked the familiar route that I trod for four years when I attended Bishop Brady High School. My feet seemed to instinctively know where to walk and I didn’t even need to watch the ground. As I made my way through White Park and up Auburn Street to Columbus Avenue, I was amazed at how comforting it all seemed. So little had seemed to be changed and yet that world of forty plus years ago is so different.

I was pleased to still be able to make the trek in just under twenty minutes, the same pace I kept as a teenager. In fact it was because of my “speed walking” that Harvey Smith, a coach and teacher at Brady urged me to try out for the track team.

Although Dr. Penhale had told me, as a child, that I would “outgrow my Asthma,” it never seemed to happen although I eagerly awaited the morning I would wake-up asthma-free.

My track career was short-lived but a few years later, as a challenge to myself, I tackled the Boston Marathon and managed to finish it, in under five days!!

Were we safer in those days from the middle part of the last century or do memories simply make it seem that way?

I still vividly recall being in Miss O’Mara’s first grade class at the “old” Kimball School on North Spring Street. This was not the school more recently torn down but a block or so north where a small park/playground now exists.

Our class was in the basement due to lack of space and an increasing Baby Boom population.

While Miss O’Mara assured us that if the Russians sent over bombs we were very safe in the basement, we still periodically practiced ducking for cover under our desks with the same regularity that we held Fire Drills.

A few years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis I remember adults talking in whispered tones so as not to alarm the children.

In an era when there were really only three sources of television news (NBC, CBS and ABC), we as pre-teeners didn’t pay much attention to what Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley were saying and went on about our own business. It wasn’t until after the crisis was averted that the enormity of what almost happened began to resonate.

Today, with the Internet and hundreds of channels and outlets to choose from, very little slips by without notice – good in some ways but it can also force someone to grow up too quickly, depriving them of a few years of the sheer joy of being young.

Nearly 50 years ago (September 1964), I went with a few friends to Boston Garden to see The Beatles. We were all way too young to drive so were let off by a parent who promised to pick us up two hours later in a designated spot.

After the concert someone suggested we track down the Beatles and say hello. He boasted that he’d been to the Garden enough times to know all the hallways and passages.

We rounded a corner and almost ran into Paul McCartney who was towel drying his hair. We stopped and chatted with him for almost 10 minutes until he was interrupted by an assistant.

In today’s world of necessary security, something like this would probably never happen, thereby depriving someone of a tale they could tell for the next half century.

I did resolve, as I completed my walk, that perhaps it’s time to make a return visit to the Boston Marathon after many years away and attempt that run as a way of honoring not only those lost and injured but all of those whose lives may never be quite as innocent again.