"Sing with me, if it's just for today, maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away," - Aerosmith
It is well after midnight that I come upon the scene: a smoking white car with a crushed front end, turned around in the middle of my lane less than a hundred yards away. Its flannel shirt-clad driver, a kid of maybe 20, is standing with one foot out the open driver's side door, talking on a cell phone. No lights, no cops. I pull over.
"You OK, man?" I yell.
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| The statue of Paul Revere in the North End |
"Yea, I'm alright," comes the shaky reply. "Hit a deer."
He points across the pavement and I cringe as I see the shattered but still-alive mass of fur desperately trying to pull itself with its working legs out of the lane and into the safety of the high grass. My stomach turns as, after a little more useless dialogue, I drive away into the night, wishing I could do something - anything - to put that deer out of its misery.
Three weeks later, my girlfriend and I are in the back of a Boston taxicab on the way back to our hotel after a night of wandering between the tightly-wound brick buildings of the historic North End, where Paul Revere's monument and the Old North Church stand sentinel over the cobblestone paths and colonial ghosts that meander along the harbor edge.
"Dream On" plays on the radio (no lie) as we pass the new Boston Garden, where a packed house is watching the Celtics play the Knicks. I'm telling our portly, scally-cap wearing cabbie about the Shore's slow recovery after Hurricane Sandy.
"It still looks like a bomb hit down there," I say absentmindedly. I've forgotten where I am.
He gives a gruff laugh.
"Hey, gotta' watch yourself with that kinda' talk around here," he says.
I give a confused look, but then it registers and for some reason I'm instantly thinking back to that kid and his smoking car back in New Jersey and how these stupid, horrifying moments shake our lives in the single tick of a second hand.
That we could freeze those moments - the ones just before "it" happens - and do something that averts the crisis, like they do in the movies!
If that kid had taken a different way home, or that deer had been scared back into the trees, both their worlds would have been saved. Instead, one stood in shock, the other dying.
Were things much different on Boylston Street barely two weeks before? Throngs of people, innocent fathers, mothers, sons, cheering as loved ones cross the finish line of what, for many, is a once-in-a-lifetime event in one of America's oldest, proudest cities.
Then, in the time it takes to exhale, shattered bodies litter the ground as limbless spectators and dead bodies transform the streetscape from quiet city Boston to the French village at the end of "Saving Private Ryan."
One split second, one fraction of a fraction of a fraction of our lives, and what was peaceful and safe has become a tangled mass of confusion, panic, and immeasurable pain.
I never thought when I began writing this column three years ago that I would have to try so often to make sense of the senseless, to bring logic to the clearly insane. This is too much though, and I lack the heart and faith necessary to explain how the death of an 8-year-old who once made a poster that said, "No more hurting people, peace" could possibly have a worthwhile purpose.
So I will not try, except to say that this world is brutal, and tragedy will strike, fearsome and unannounced, like a coiled snake when its log is overturned, no matter how unconscionable. I can't fix it. And I hate writing about it.
Instead, I will simply quote the final lines of the opening monologue of "Gone Baby Gone," the movie made by another Boston boy about a missing child, because it offers the only advice that makes any sense at this point.
"This city can be hard," it says. "When I was young I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to his children: 'You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.'"
Stay strong Boston.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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