The Afterness of Things

Last Sunday, I made time to visit with my family.  It seemed a pretty logical thing to do, after a near week had passed from Patriots Day and the grip of the previous Friday slowly loosened nerves and emotion.  I’m very glad I found the 90 minutes before rehearsal, because this happened.

I’ve pulled up this video at least once a day since, watching it multiple times.  It’s easy stress relief.  How can such cuteness not be?  To remind myself that there is still a reality where the discovery of another person is such a miraculous joy… as much a joy as the discovery of a gift bag that tastes so delicious.  They were oblivious to the thoughts, sadness, and questions as this part of the world accepts a new reality.  

The reality where an event as awe inspiring as the Boston Marathon, so full of human accomplishment and hope and love of the fellow man, will now be an event with that cloud of sadness and fear.  No matter how we press on and are strong to fight it, we will always know this April 2013 as the one that changed our city.  In good ways, in bad.  Where we know what it is like to spend a sunny April Friday inside for fear that an armed and dangerous man could act again.  

And I think, these little girls will never know what it was like before that.  But… maybe that’s okay.  And maybe just the fact that I can pull up these 30 seconds to remind me that the world is still new to their curious eyes means the new reality I now live in isn’t something to lament.

It’s just… not what I expected.  And yet, I’m pretty sure my marvel is not an original thought.  How many people stared at babies this weekend with the same relief and hope?  How many people did that the weekend of Pearl Harbor?  Or the original Patriots Day?  Or in cities all around the world that don’t have a decade or century gap between a bombing?  Placing their hope on the young who have not yet lived and known what life was before.

There is one very short video of me at this age… something I remembered as I contemplated the present ubiquity of icontraptions.  It was around that time that my family suffered a tragedy.  Nothing that affected a whole city, but one that still is felt with sadness whenever the name Lee Michael is mentioned.    I wondered if my aunts and uncles watched me as I watch Hannah and Lily to find the joy to combat the despair of grief.  I grew up never knowing the before when he was alive and played at Mt. Pleasant Ave., or poked his head in my parents’ car as they left for the hospital with the hope I would be a boy.  I don’t know what was lost.  I don’t know really what was gained, that might not have been were the events of that summer any different.  I do know my family loves one another so very much.  And maybe that’s all that matters.

Now a week has passed since that weird, tense day.  The sun is shining.  The magnolias are in full bloom.  The traffic is depressingly slow.  The sirens that wail endlessly during my day have almost retreated into background noise again.  The intensity of feeling is slowly calming down.  I feel I see things with new eyes.  There is still that echo… an echo I imagine this city will always feel now… but it is part of who we are, a wound that heals us and prompts us to become stronger.  To look at a simple thirty seconds of unadulterated joy and say, okay.  Here we are.