The Week I Became a Bostonian

The Boston bombing, ten years later: a personal reflection

Photo by todd kent on Unsplash

Today is Patriots’ Day, a holiday in Massachusetts and very few other states. A decade ago on this holiday, my family and I went to the Red Sox game. The Sox play at home every year on Patriots’ Day; it’s the only MLB game on the entire schedule that starts in the AM. The tradition is that one can attend the Sox game, and then after it ends amble over to see the end of the Boston Marathon.

That particular Red Sox game was pretty exciting, ending with a walk-off in the bottom of the ninth after the Tampa Bay Rays had tied it in the top half of the inning:

It was a special game at the start of what would become a special season for the Red Sox.

My family and I usually have only have the bandwidth to enjoy one outing per day, so instead of checking out the Marathon we hopped on the Green Line to head home. It was on the tail end of that ride home that folks started checking their phones and realizing what had happened near the finish line.

That Monday was the start of a crazy week. In the ensuing days every cable new network sent their anchors to broadcast from Boston. #BostonStrong trended. Reddit got stuff wrong in an effort at collective amateur sleuthing. I was awoken that Friday AM by a phone call instructing my family to shelter in place because the bomber was possibly on the run in my town. They were caught later that evening. And then David Ortiz eloquently expressed the emotions that a many in the region were feeling:

Ten years later, all the retrospectives of that week correctly note the influence of social media on news coverage. For me, however, in a weird way, that week was the first time I truly felt like I was a local.

Boston is widely perceived as a provincial town, and there is truth to that stereotype. I did not grow up here. When my family moved to the area in the mid-2000s, I remember neighbors staring dumbfoundedly at us when we said we had come from Chicago. In our neighborhood, people moved in from Somerville or Watertown, not from another time zone.

So it was a little strange at first. If you stick around a place long enough, however, roots start to develop. Shared experiences can accelerate the process, and as awful as this sounds, shared trauma can accelerate it even more rapidly. The week of the Boston bombing was definitely an accelerant. Until then, I had never thought of myself as a native; after that, I realized the roots had taken. This process accelerated during the pandemic; the folks in my neighborhood checked in with each other on a regular basis. I have now lived in the Boston area longer than anywhere else in my life. I’m a local now.

It helps that as easy as it is to mock the Boston area in a variety of ways, there are also legitimate reasons for civic pride. The quantity and quality of health care in this region is pretty damn good; there is a reason no one who was put into an ambulance on the day of the Boston bombing lost their life. Locals care a fair amount about the education system as well.¹ The local bookstore scene is pretty awesome. And the civic pride thing goes beyond the sports teams. My wife and I went to a recent Museum of Fine Arts exhibit on Katsushika Hokusai's artistic legacy, thinking it would be a quiet afternoon. The place was mobbed.

Earlier this month, Alec MacGillis asked, “why has Boston been largely spared the rise in violence, disorder and downtown distress experienced by demographically similar cities such as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco?” Nate Silver added, “Its outcomes have begin to diverge from the rest of the US in lots of weird ways (e.g. higher life expectancy, less partisanship, fared better under COVID).”² Alex Reimer’s response rang true: “I think there is something about the culture here. It’s not a wild city, for better or worse. The large numbers of hospitals and universities play a huge role, too. I think Bostonians value community as well. There’s a huge civic culture, from sports to the arts.”

Like any place, Boston has its issues: the cost of housing is ridiculous, the T has its issues, the traffic can be unbearable, and I hear that the city has some unresolved racial issues. But the nice thing about the area is that it also has strengths that can be built on. A decade ago, the local response to the bombing from David Ortiz on down was legitimately strong.

Ten years later, the Red Sox might not be as good. But the Celtics and Bruins are picking up the sports slack, and the region has demonstrated resilience across a wide array of socioeconomic indicators. And I’m a local now.

1. Fun fact: a few years before the bombing, my local public high school held an open house after a nine-figure reconstruction effort that seemed to have taken forever. The open house was the same day and time as the Patriots’ first game of the season. I took my son, thinking that we would have the run of the place. The school was mobbed with interested parents and children.

2. Silver is right about the partisanship. To be sure, Massachusetts currently has unified Democratic control over the executive and legislative branches. This has only been the case for 9 out of the last 32 years, however. The state is perfectly comfortable with moderate Republicans, a fact the state GOP has decided to ignore.