Hey! You Can Help Without Leaving the Computer!

The American Red Cross is set up to take much-needed cash donations online! Just go to:

http://www.redcross.org/donate/

and whip out the 'ol check card or even some heavier plastic if you feel so inclined. It'll make you feel all accomplished and helpful, I promise!

The Day After

Logan airport may be closed to the public, but what woke me up this morning was the sound of planes over my apartment building. I got up and heard a second plane. I had never really been conscious of the sound of airplanes before, and neither Aral nor I could remember if we had been in a flight path before yesterday. Normally airplane noises are something we ignore, but we both knew that no planes were supposed to be anywhere near Boston this morning. The FAA had said the night before that no airplanes should be in the sky at all until noon today, and no one knew when Logan would open again. Aral and I decided they must be letting military planes land at Logan, or maybe just government planes carrying FBI agents. The choppers were still all around town today too, just like they had been yesterday. But we heard airplanes, and in one case saw one.

I was going to give blood today, but after I turned on the television, the Red Cross was asking people to please wait until Thursday at least before coming down. The blood banks were just jammed, and one blood drive that was an annual event sponsored by firefighters had lines that stretched around the block. It was nice to see that so many people chose to respond to the tragedy in New York that way.

Around one o’clock there was nearly a riot in Copley Square. A bunch of police or maybe FBI agents in an unpainted metal truck wearing riot gear stormed the Westin Hotel. The Westin sits on a corner between the Copley Plaza Hotel and the Boston Public Library. On the other side of the Copley Plaza Hotel is the John Hancock building, a skyscraper made of shiny, mirrored glass almost 100 stories tall. A great green space and pavilion is the open “square” of Copley Square, and this is where the Boston Marathon ends every year.

Crowds of people filled up Copley Square just as the Westin was stormed. Someone had tipped the media, and the wild rumor ran that terrorists were inside the Westin. All the local stations had coverage, and I watched as the people in Copley Square had to be held back by police. Everyone thought the FBI would be bringing out terrorists. Almost all the cops in Boston rushed to the square to contain the crowd, and the motorcycle cops used their bikes to make a barricade so the crowd wouldn’t push into the Westin. My immediate thought was “that’s a lynch mob”.

But then it wasn’t. The Bomb Squad truck came tearing up the street with lights flashing, and as people thought that there was a bomb, a great part of the crowd surged away from the Westin. But there was no bomb. There were no terrorists either. The men in riot gear came back out of the Westin with their battering rams and shields unused. The crowd of people never became a mob.

I went to class and learned a bunch of new and exciting things. Then I came home and my mother told me she wanted me to pick a place to settle down after I graduate, a place with no national monuments.

Two weeks before I moved to Boston in the fall of 2000, some crazy asshole stepped into a fast-food restaurant in Rutherford County, Tennessee, and shot every employee in the place for just a couple of hundred bucks. They never caught the guy.

Crazy people who will kill you for what’s in your pockets live everywhere. If someone decides to take me out, I want to die somewhere that makes me happy. My friend Dinan Pullen and I used to swear that if we were mortally wounded in a car accident in Rutherford County, we would refuse to die until we had dragged our bleeding, twisted bodies over the county line, just so we could die in Nashville instead. I like living here, and I had just decided to stay in Boston for another year when this horrible tragedy occurred. I’m not going to let a bunch of homicidal maniacs scare me into changing my mind.