“Marathon Monday” brings back so many memories for me. I don’t have anything particularly meaningful to say on the matter, but I suspect that these adventures form a healthy amount of jumping off points for the autobiography of anyone like me.
I grew up in Hopkinton, and for as long as I can remember, I have described the town to people as “26.2 miles west of Boston… where the Marathon starts.” I’ve worn that as if it were a defining part of me. In my years, I’ve been to the start of the race a few dozen times, and always watch at least a few hours of coverage on TV each year. Not the biggest fan in the world, I know, but also not bad.
Hopkinton was a small town of about 8,000 people when I was growing up. I graduated with fewer than 100 seniors, if I recall correctly, and everyone would come out to participate in or volunteer at the Boston Marathon. Honestly, it was just about all we had going for us. Once a year, our town’s name would be on the local news for a weekend, and the rest of the time, few people would be able to pin us on the map. Some years, four to five times our population would show up to race, and be gone down the road, just as quickly, leaving behind sweatpants, water bottles, and underpants, which also were gone, just as quickly, when our volunteers sprang to action to return our town to its normal beauty, filling trash bags with clothing to be donated to charities (or so I’ve heard; I do hope this is the fate of the pile of clothing).
My high school band would play in the town gazebo at the festivities leading up to the sounding of the pistol, which took place in those days at noon, for both men and women (wheelchairs began their race fifteen minutes prior). At the time, it was exciting, but also, I must admit, a bit of a drag to perform at the event. Traffic would shut down early in the morning, and if you planned to drive there, it would require a very early start, and a lot of time to kill. One year my mother and I headed to Carrigan Park where we intended to sit in our car before walking the rest of the distance to the town common for my warm-up and performance. I don’t remember exactly when I noticed that I had not brought my instrument along, but it involved driving back through the now-closed roads with my mother telling all the policemen who tried to stop us that “he forgot his clarinet”. Class act, I was. I had so little to think about that day, and still managed to forget the one thing I needed. Once we made it back to Carrigan Park, I remember vividly (for whatever reason) that I read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy during the lull before heading up the street on foot.
Alternately, you could catch a bus at the industrial parks about half a mile from my parents’ home, and ride all the way to the center of town. This seemed almost unfathomable to me, at the time; the rural notion that someone other than your mom or the school bus driver could take you somewhere in your own town. We had no public transportation, and this just boggled the mind.
One year, my father was interviewed while eating some fried dough on the town common, something we completely forgot about until months later when some visitors to “our” campground picked him out of the crowd as someone they’d seen on television that April. Weird, I can’t imagine what a scene he must have been causing in order to be so memorable. Some things are best unremembered!
We’d get those sweet BAA volunteer jackets for participating in the band. What a badge of honor for the band in the weeks following. And how rare it was that the band were the cool kids for any substantial period of time, but it was just about the only way a kid could earn a jacket. I had a few, but one of them had very tight cuffs. They seem to be different colors each year now, but both of the ones I remember having were aqua.
It’s been some time since I’ve been to the starting line for the race, but in many recent years I have found my way to the area on the day or two beforehand. Just yesterday, my wife and I drove from church to my parents’ Easter dinner via route 135 and got to see the hubbub of cameras being placed and tested, portable toilets being installed, and barricades being assembled. It brought back many of these thoughts.
Recently, new memories of the marathon tried to force themselves into our minds here in my new town, just ten miles west of Boston. But after today’s fabulous showing, the drama on the course, and the outpouring of support from every visitor, I became sure that those darker memories would not dominate forever. This morning, rather, I watched, fondly remembering what it was like to live in that tiny burg, just 26.2 miles west of Boston. That’s what sticks.