Category Personal Reflections

Please forgive the impossibly pretentious headline above. I think Rev. Martin Luther King would both forgive and understand it, because he above all would appreciate the tremendous sense of solidarity engendered by his justifiably famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and all the other events of 1963 in this quintessentially Southern town that would so change the course of history.

I arrived here on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of George Wallace’s theatrical standing in the University of Alabama school doors to ostensibly prevent the admittance of black students in defiance of a federal court order. (Wallace at least had enough sense not to actively defy the federal marshals and troops sent there by President Kennedy and his attorney general and brother Bobby to enforce the law.) I paid respects with my family at the now historic 16^th Avenue First Baptist Church where Ku Klux Klansmen murdered four...

We were sitting in a private room in the ER, X-rays done, waiting for the doctor to arrive to show us the pictures and prescribe a course of action. That’s when my 14-year-old daughter had what was her first, I think, enlightenment moment, fully grasping, in a personal and urgent way, the strange tragic happenstances that can alter life in a blink. Thankfully, the in-breaking bit of wisdom didn’t cost her very much by way of bodily injury.

“It’s so weird,” she said, a shallow laugh coming into her voice somewhere near the top of her throat. “This morning I woke up and went to school and everything was all usual, and now I’m in ER with a broken finger.”

She’d been playing first base for her high school’s JV softball team when she reached to dig a throw out of the dirt and the ball struck her non-gloved hand in just the right freakish way to dislocate the joint at her knuckle and cause a small br...

No matter the event, whether tragedy or triumph, we look for connections. “I was born and grew up there!”

“My sister lives around the corner!”

“I did a summer internship in that building!”

“My nephew was his college roommate!”

Most grievously, when the connection has been foisted on us by life’s merciless and random roulette wheel: “That was my 8-year-old son who died in the blast.”

My own connection to the Boston Marathon is manifold. Exactly 20 years ago, I had approached that same finishing line where the explosions happened, exultant, like everyone, after finally living every runner’s dream: I had run Boston. It would be my final marathon, a grand occasion that had drawn me out of “retirement,” and for which I endured many months of difficult training and injury setbacks, none of which mattered as I floated down Boylston Street into the finisher’s chute.

I’ve also been in ...

It’s a day like most every other day. A Friday, to be exact. Early morning. Maybe you’re out for a stroll, or nursing a cup of coffee at the neighborhood café, or making oatmeal for your children before carting them off to daycare. Perhaps you’re making love, or just soaping up in your bath.

And then it hits. The meteor. The meteor that was nowhere just minutes ago. Or at least nowhere that could be seen by you here on this tiny planet in this immeasurably vast and dark universe. If you were outdoors at that hour, you likely saw it streak across the sky, at least had time to exclaim, “Look at that! What is it? Wow, look at that!!”

If you were indoors, there was no prelude, no blaze across the sky, no warning at all before it hit...

I think you’ll be delighted to know that Susan Deborah King, the author of the poem we discussed in this space last week, “As Death Approaches” in the volume titled One-Breasted Woman (chronicling her near lethal battle with breast cancer), is alive and writing today, five years after publication. She even has a website currently “under construction,” and if that’s not a statement of faith in the future, I don’t know what is!

I love the almost delirious gratitude of this poem, the surveying of her life’s riches even as death hovers behind her lost breast, her bald head, her nausea from the chemo. Her laughter and gratitude serve as flares to brighten the darkness that can seem so enveloping “As Death Approaches.”

It’s been my not-all-that rare privilege to attend many deaths over the years; I suppose it’s one of the ambiguous benefits of having been gifted to live as long as I have...