Ornoth

Every so often, curiosity impels me to check out my former homes on Google Streetview, to see how much they’ve changed over time. Usually it’s nothing dramatic, but today’s exception left me stunned, shocked, and incredibly grateful.

Back in 2001, I bought my first – and to date only – property, a condo unit on the second floor of the historic former Hotel Vendome, located in Boston’s trendy Back Bay.

By far its most dramatic feature – and the reason I selected it after viewing seventy others – was a sweeping view of the neighborhood. The living room’s south-facing bay windows not only offered tons of delightful sunshine, but overlooked an empty lot that had served as a parking lot since 1958. It was the only unit I’d seen that had such a wide-open vista.

That panorama included many of Boston’s notable buildings: the Hancock tower, the Prudential tower, the New Old South Church with its distinctive Italianate campanile, 500 Boylston, 222 Berkeley, the Boston Art Club and the 1884 headquarters of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club (both now part of the Snowden School). I could watch shoppers walking along trendy Newbury Street, catch glimpses of Boston Marathon participants as they finished in Copley Square, or admire the colorful DuBarry trompe d’oeil mural that decorated the exterior of one of the buildings facing the parking lot.

It was truly a fabulous view, and I enjoyed it virtually every single day for the fifteen years that I lived there. Here’s what it looked like around the time I moved in (as always, click through for a larger version):

Of course, there were also days when it looked a little more like this:

It was no secret to me how great a blessing it was that no one had built anything on that lot. In fact, it was kind of a mystery why it never happened. Although I never heard rumor of any plans, it was something I always feared. But nothing ever materialized, and I moved out and sold the unit in February 2016.

So you can imagine my shock when I happened to check my old place out on StreetView. Here’s the closest equivalent to what you would see out my bay windows as of September 2022:

Yeah. Wow.

The lot was purchased in 2019 by L3 Capital in Chicago, who filed a project review in 2020 with the Boston Planning and Development Agency for a five-story, 43,000 square foot building containing retail and office space. A building permit was issued a year later, and construction appears to have moved along rapidly.

So that accounts for my “stunned and shocked” reaction.

As for “gratitude”, that comes from having enjoyed that unsurpassed view for fifteen wonderful years, and for the blind luck of having sold when I did, just four years before this development project came to light, on land that had been a parking lot for the previous sixty years!

My Back Bay condo was a truly amazing place to live, and that panoramic view was a huge, irreplaceable part of it. But that treasured view is one that I truly can never again experience.

I’m not a packrat, but I have an eye for memorabilia, socking away strange little keepsakes that would otherwise land in a dumpster. Examples include circuit boards from the PDP-11 system I managed in college, and the brass corporate mission plaque from MediQual, my first post-college employer.

Another such item is a poster-sized oil painting that hung over Sapient’s front desk back in 1995, when I was first hired by the nascent internet consulting company.

It was an original composition by Courtney, Sapient’s receptionist, who had recently graduated with a bachelors degree in studio art at Dartmouth College. Painted a year earlier, it depicts a streetscape of brownstones in Boston’s South End, where she lived.

During her years at Sapient, Courtney left the front desk and led new employee orientation, then ran Sapient’s People Strategy Organization (aka HR), and finally took overall responsibility for corporate culture. Over that time we had several moves and refreshes of our office space, and her painting was thrown into permanent storage and forgotten.

When the Dot-Com bubble burst, Sapient needed to shrink its physical footprint. Being a curious little opportunist, one day I accompanied our Operations team as they cleaned out one of the storage areas. Unearthing Courtney’s painting, and knowing that she was no longer around, I received permission to adopt it.

That was around 2002, toward the end of my tenure at Sapient, and just after my purchase of a condo in Boston’s Copley Square. When I brought the painting home, it took pride of place on the brick wall in my front entryway. And there it hung.

Years later, before I left Boston, I reached out to Courtney and offered to pay her or give the painting back. Despite initial interest, she never made arrangements to pick it up, and I never heard from her again.

The painting has been with me for nearly two decades, and now graces our Pittsburgh dining room. It is a treasured reminder of Boston, my time at Sapient, and the Back Bay condo I loved.

When I moved from Boston to Pittsburgh, one of my friends was interested in how the two cities differed. After living here for a year, I now feel like I can make some somewhat informed contrasts.

Here’s my list of the top twenty differences between Boston and Pittsburgh.

• Time is a little bit different. Pittsburgh is a little further south than Boston, so its days are a little longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. But more importantly, Boston is at the eastern edge of the time zone, while Pittsburgh is at the western end; so the sun rises and sets about 30-45 minutes later.
• Pittsburgh doesn’t get Boston’s cold onshore sea breezes in the spring. On the other hand, Boston doesn’t get Pittsburgh’s periodic light lake effect snow.
• There aren’t many evergreens in western Pennsylvania. It’s mostly hardwood, unlike New England.
• Obviously Pittsburgh is hillier, but the soil is also different. Boston is granite and glacial till, whereas Pittsburgh is all sedimentary rock: visible strata of limestone, sandstone, and shale, a whopping three miles deep!
• Surprisingly, western PA has a lot fewer lakes than New England. Most rainfall winds up coursing down narrow canyons and into the major rivers.
• Because of this lack of natural reservoirs to trap and hold rainwater and snow melt, combined with the steepness and softness of the underlying rock, western PA is very prone to flash flooding and debris in the roads. The only time New England floods is during spring runoff, and that rarely washes debris into the roadways.
• Aside from its tiny downtown, Pittsburgh is a much less walkable city. Distances between points of interest are greater, and the outlying towns don’t have dense commercial or cultural centers, so it’s mostly undifferentiated sprawl.
• As such, Pittsburgh is a much more car-oriented city. There’s no subway, no commuter rail, and minimal public transportation. The automobile is a necessity here, whereas they are a liability in Boston.
• Despite that, the landscape and street design makes it stunningly difficult to get from Point A to Point B in Pittsburgh. Unlike Boston, where you can pick between several bad routes, there’s usually only one way for Pittsburghers to get where they need to go. That in turn creates horrible blighted sections of roadway like Bigelow, Liberty, Washington Boulevard, Second, Fifth, Penn, Carson, Ft. Duq, 51, and BotA.
• Because of the poorly-designed infrastructure, and Penn DOT’s unconcealed hostility toward accommodating cyclists and pedestrians, there are fewer road cyclists in Pittsburgh, and more of them are killed by motorists than happen in Boston, where government is more responsive and the cycling and pedestrian advocacy groups are better organized.
• Between that and the lumpy terrain, there aren’t as many century rides in western PA as there are back in Massachusetts.
• Pittsburgh does have a ton of railroads and former railroad and mill property. There’s a lot more post-industrial wasteland than you find in Boston, where most of it has already been cleaned up and redeveloped. In that sense, Pittsburgh is more like Lawrence MA, only on a vastly larger scale.
• There’s certainly more poverty, abandoned and/or condemned property, and overall urban blight in Pittsburgh. Property values are too high in Boston for space to sit unused and uncared-for very long.
• There does seem to be a greater rate of crime, murder, and drug problems in Pittsburgh, as well.
• There are, of course, certain neighborhoods in Pittsburgh that are gentrifying, but it’s decades behind Boston in rehabilitating itself overall. Tho they’ve made a lot of progress from their industrial past.
• In addition to property prices being lower, salaries are also much lower in Pittsburgh than Boston, which has always been a tech hub. On the other hand, groceries in Boston are considerably less expensive than western PA.
• There’s less ethnic diversity in Pittsburgh than Boston. Sure, there are some small enclaves, but Boston is far more integrated than Pittsburgh, with a greater variety and diffusion of immigrants from all kinds of ethinic origins.
• At the same time, western PA has a whole lot more uneducated, low income white folk. The substantial redneck population reminds me a lot more of rural Maine than cosmopolitan Boston.
• Pittsburgh might be widely known for its food, but I find it pretty uninspired. Their signature pizza places don’t even deliver! Frankly, I don’t know how they stay in business, because delivery makes up the majority of most pizza joints’ orders. Oh, and they call them “cuts”, not “slices”. Stupid.
• On the other hand, Verizon doesn’t sell its Fios fiber optic internet service in Boston. It does in Pittsburgh, and that’s a noteworthy plus!

On leap day, we closed the sale of my apartment in the historic Hotel Vendome condo in Boston’s Copley Square.

Neither my original purchase nor the recent sale of the property were my favorite life experiences. Both entailed an awful lot of seemingly-unnecessary complexity, risk, and bother. Although I suppose the size of the transaction warrants such precautions.

When I bought the unit back in 2001, I was looking for a safe place to stash the proceeds from participating in Sapient’s IPO and meteoric rise to prominence and inclusion in the S&P 500. I paid a lot of capital gains tax and bought when real estate prices were high, but at least I liquidated my company stock options before the Internet Bubble burst in the early 2000s. Many of my coworkers held onto their shares—or worse still, used them as margin leverage—and lost all their unrealized fortunes when the market turned on them.

In the end, I’d like to say that owning a condo turned out to be a really good investment. After all, it proved to be a lot safer than Sapient stock, and the property appreciated by about 33 percent during the fifteen years I was there.

On the other hand, I paid a whole shitload of mortgage interest. While that (and property taxes) provided a nice income tax deduction, the government gives you the deduction because you are paying so much in interest (and property tax). So net-net, I’m not sure I got a better return than if I had invested the money somewhere else.

The good news is that I’m debt-free for the first time in 15 years, which is always an awesome feeling. Even though I’m over 50, being financially self-sufficient and independent remains one of the most central values that I inherited from my parents.

However, liquidating that big asset comes with the intimidating (but probably desirable) challenge of figuring out how to best invest the proceeds, which represent about 90 percent of my net worth. I’m thinking something fairly defensive, but we’ll just have to see how it turns out.

And after listening to me talk about the move for so long, you’ll probably be happy to know that this severs my final significant tie to Boston. You’ll still hear lots about my exploration of my new home in Pittsburgh, but the long-talked-about departure from Boston is finally complete.

I’ll certainly miss the Vendome. It was my first experience in home buying, ownership, and selling, It was an amazing location and a wonderful place to be for those 15 years, and I loved it dearly. More than any other house in a long, long time, it felt like home to me, and I’ll miss that a lot.

But it belongs to a chapter of my life that’s now finished. Now it’s time to look forward to whatever new story unfolds.

After a record-short 333 days, my tenure at Buildium is over.

Last winter’s ludicrous snowfall finally put the nail in the coffin of continuing to live in Boston. But it also became clear that moving out of Boston wasn’t compatible with my employer’s plan to centralize their personnel locally and stop supporting people working remotely. I had hoped to stay on while relocating, because it would obviate the need for any Pittsburgh job hunt, but given our opposing directions it was inevitable that Buildium and I would have to part ways when I left town.

In the past, when I left a company (as opposed to being laid off or having the company move out from underneath me), I’ve always been fortunate to move on to something better. In 1995 I jumped from a failing medical software company to a rapidly-growing nascent internet consultancy, which was without question the best career move I’ve ever made. And in 2006 I left a tiny professional services contractor to return to large-scale internet consulting just as open-source and “Web 2.0” were taking off. It would be awesome if this departure leads to similar improvement, especially given the way front-end coding has transformed over the past couple years.

The unfortunate aspect of my departure is that I’ve been really happy at Buildium and would prefer to stay. While property management software isn’t the noblest purpose in the world, it was a huge improvement over my previous job spamming students and funneling leads to student loan companies. I greatly improved my technical skills, the hours and stress level were uncommonly humane, and the pay was good.

And the people were awesome. Buildium’s leadership team has its share of challenges, but it’s been very satisfying to once again work with and for people with a healthy dose of both intelligence and common sense—as might be expected from a company founded by and stocked with fellow Sapient alumni.

But more than that, what makes Buildium unique—both among my former employers as well as across the industry—is that its staff are enthusiastic and uncommonly personable and caring, without being contrived or dogmatic about it. From top to bottom, the positive attitude of their team members sets Buildium apart from other places I’ve worked.

That’s a big reason why I would have preferred to stay on as one of several remote workers on their engineering team. Sadly, the commitment to centralizing operations in Boston made that impossible. And after 25 years here, my life is taking me in a different direction.

Although that didn’t stop me from feeling a certain righteous amusement when HR asked the employees to vote on what Buildium could do become a better place to work. Someone added “Work remotely” to the list of ideas, and sixteen people put their checkmark-votes next to that item: more than twice as many as any other suggestion!

And if that input had been put into practice, I would still be working there, rather than going my own way and diving back into the job market in an unfamiliar town.

As part of this whole move thing, I’ve begun looking into UX job opportunities in Pittsburgh. Naturally, I’m gonna start by looking into things I know work here in Boston: tech meetups, events, and local branches of national groups.

Among the most successful branch groups here is something called Refresh Boston. Here’s how they describe themselves on their website:

Naturally, I wanted to see if they had an equally active branch operating in my future home. Here’s the number one result when searching on “Refresh Pittsburgh”. The contrast is pretty damn telling, don’t you think?

It’s official: in six weeks TT the Bears will shutter and disappear, leaving Central Square that much more normal.

Right next door to the Middle East, TT’s booked bands that would have struggled in that larger venue. But that gave TT’s the freedom to feature all kinds of unknown but enjoyable acts.

And the tiny size of the club made the concertgoing experience that much more intimate, whether you wanted it or not! You couldn’t physically get more than about 30 feet from the stage.

I can’t say I was a regular at TT’s, but I did see my share of shows. My buddy Bob Corsaro will be glad to know that I was there to see his ska band, the Brass Monkeys, play no less than four times. Multiple shows by Boston ska royalty the Allstonians and Beat Soup. Inspecter 7. Dow Jones & the Industrials.

One of the more memorable shows I enjoyed was Mono Puff, a bizarre alt-rock collage orchestrated by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants fame. As they might tell you themselves, “It was totally rockin’!”

But the most unforgettable moment was the night I met Greg Hawkes, the original keyboardist for the Cars. He was the only band member who showed up at a 2005 show celebrating the release of a Cars tribute album by a collection of Boston-based bands.

I was introduced to Mr. Hawkes by show organizer Andrea Kremer, and actually got to sit with him and chat before he took the stage as guest performer for “Just What I Needed”. It remains one of the most cherished memories of my time in the scene. You can read more about that show and see my other photos in my blogpost, “Life’s the same, except for my shoes…”

Now TT’s becomes another in a long list of legendary Boston music clubs that can only be spoken of in the past tense. But these memories remain.

Back in 1995, I left my job running a mainframe for a medical software company and joined a small but growing local IT consulting company. Their ambitious corporate tagline was: Changing the Way the World Works.

It’s not often that an individual can have that kind of impact, but earlier this month I was presented with photographic evidence that I found both deeply touching… and deeply humorous.

During my seven years with that consulting company—Sapient—we grew from 100 people to 3600, had a public IPO, and were named to the S&P 500. I was one of their first web developers, who helped them transition from just client-server IT projects to doing their first large-scale e-commerce, banking, and stock brokerage websites.

Today Sapient employs over 12,000 people globally, and (for whatever reason) they’ve chosen to sponsor the Boston Red Sox. While that tagline seemed awfully ambitious for a 100-person company back in 1995, one of the visible signs of Sapient’s success at “changing the way the world works” is the recent presence of their corporate logo adorning that most famous edifice in Major League Baseball: Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

That kinda freaks me out, but it is also a reminder that I had a part in something that really did have a major impact on the world.

During my tenure at Sapient, I started riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge, a fundraising bike ride for the Jimmy Fund. The PMC has been a partner of the Boston Red Sox since 2003, and each year they devote one game to recognizing the PMC and its riders. And in recent years, that has included unveiling a huge PMC logo on the Green Monster.

Having been part of the PMC for 14 years—in the process, raising over $100,000 for cancer research, treatment, and prevention—that recognition means a lot to me.

So I was pretty heartily amused when I saw the photos from this year’s PMC Day at Fenway Park. There in huge script for all to see are two of the biggest accomplishments of my life—the Pan-Mass Challenge and Sapient—right next to one another on the biggest billboard in professional sport.

Obviously, I can’t claim sole responsibility for those two organizations’ work, but I can take pride in having made a meaningful contribution to each, and that those contributions have helped create thriving organizations that will continue to have positive impacts on the world.

But I still think it’s funny as hell whenever I see those two logos out there in left field, right next to one another. Life sure is strange!

Patriots’ Day is a state holiday, which my employer honored until this year, having been purchased by a company in Las Vegas that doesn’t think particularly much of Massachusetts’ Revolutionary War history.

The Boston Marathon, which takes place on that day, finishes a block—150 yards—from my condo. Between setup, tear-down, and cleanup, it royally screws up transportation for most of a week. Street closures bring most of the neighborhood to a standstill. They close my MBTA station (Copley) and you physically cannot cross Boylston Street without going a mile out of your way.

Since I would be unable to get to work (or back), I chose to work from home on this year’s Patriots’ Day. In the evening, I also had an appointment to pick up my new bike and do a full fitting, although I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get through the crowds to get to the bike shop!

For most of the day, I ignored the race. Public events are common where I live, whether it’s the Walk for Hunger or a pride parade or a Critical Mass ride or a sports team celebrating a championship or a free concert or a political rally or the Santa Speedo Run or whatever. I mostly tuned out the race’s PA announcer, the shouting vendors, and the partying revelers. Once or twice I looked out my window to see the crowds of exhausted runners walking down Boylston Street, having just crossed the finish line.

Just before 3pm I heard a loud boom. Yes, it might have sounded like a canon, but the first thing I thought of was that someone had taken a huge dump truck and dropped it from 20 feet up. It was an echoing heavy metal sound, like a big truck carrying steel I-beams hitting a wall. Except the concussion was a lot stronger than that. My building was rocked, and a dozen building and car alarms were going off.

Twelve seconds later, as I wondered what was up, I heard the second blast. It was further away from me, but still didn’t sound normal. I got up and went to the window and saw hundreds of panicked runners, spectators, and volunteers streaming out of Copley Square, running down Dartmouth Street toward me. (That’s my condo in the news photo at right.)

Something very bad had obviously happened in the square. I looked for the smoke that would be the tell-tale sign of an explosion, but there was none that I could see above the single row of five-story brownstones between me and the finish line.

My first instinct was to share the news. I went to Facebook and entered what I knew:

Something bad at the marathon… People running all over. Two huge booms, whole building shook, emergency vehicles all over the place.

My next instinct was that this was going to be national news, and I should reach out to friends and family who might wonder if I was injured, so that was my next task.

After that, there was just a whole lot of news watching, and checking out my window as runners, volunteers, and spectators fled the area, rescue vehicles swarmed in to assist the injured, and law enforcement units sealed off the neighborhood.

As it turned out, the first bomb blast was a block from me (see the map), right near my bank and across the street from the Boston Public Library. The second was a block further up, across from Lord & Taylor and my walking route to my neighborhood grocery store.

Although cell service was initially flooded—and despite persistent reports that the police had intentionally terminated cell phone service city-wide—service freed up as people gradually left the neighborhood. I spent the next couple hours fielding inquiries from friends via cell phone, Facebook, instant messaging, and text messages.

Despite all the chaos, I still thought that I could make my bike fitting appointment across town, and brought my old bike down to the lobby. On the way out the door I heard another muffled boom which apparently was a controlled detonation of an abandoned bag that wound up being completely innocuous.

On the street, thousands of people were milling around aimlessly, and the cops had cordoned Dartmouth street off at Commonwealth Avenue. What that meant is that my building was squarely on the edge of the lockdown zone; We could go in and out the main (north) entry, but the side (east) and rear (south) doors were off limits.

I biked off through streets that were largely empty of cars, but with a large number of pedestrians walking around obliviously. Once I got to the bike shop, I saw the “closed early” sign and turned around and made my way home. Knowing Comm Ave would be a mess due to the marathon, I took my only other alternative: the Charles River bike path.

While crossing the Dartmouth Street footbridge over Storrow Drive, one matronly lady headed in the other direction yelled at me, “Don’t go there! The police are there!” to which I, of course, responded, “I live there.”

A few minutes after I got settled back into my apartment, our fire alarm started going off. I assumed the cops had decided to evacuate us, but I checked the hallway and actually smelled smoke. So I started going through the handy list of evacuation tasks I keep by the door. Grady the cat, who up until now had shown absolutely no evidence of concern, was (justifiably) spooked by the blaring fire alarm and it took me a while to corner him and get him into his carrier.

As it turned out, one of the residents had burned dinner. What an irresponsible thing to do, given all the other stuff going on in the neighborhood that needed the fire department’s attention! After a bit of fresh air, the residents were let back inside to soothe our now doubly-jangled nerves.

As night fell, outside my window Newbury Street—which was within the lockdown zone—was absolutely deserted except for cops and military personnel. Absolutely no one was allowed into or out of most of the Back Bay. Huge situation response trucks took up station as the police began to comb through what they termed a “crime scene” that was several square miles in area.

I had planned to take the next day (Tuesday) off to ride my new bike. Despite not having the bike, with the entire neighborhood sealed off there was very little point in trying to get to work, so I took it as a vacation day. And if I could get out and pick up the bike, then I’d take it for a bit of a shakedown cruise.

That morning, one positive development was that the cops opened up Newbury Street to traffic, reducing the lockdown zone a bit and ensuring that my building, at least, would be accessible.

I wasn’t home for much of the day, tho. It was an amazingly stressful and hectic day, made worse by the continuing closure of the Copley MBTA station. At a high level, it went like this…

Walk half a mile to Hynes station. Get past National Guard troops. Take the trolley to the bike shop in Brighton. Take the new bike for a 16-mile test ride outside of the city. Take the trolley back to Boston. Walk half a mile home from Arlington station. Have a Pop-Tart and a glass of juice. Ride the old bike two miles back out to the bike shop. Have an abbreviated fitting done. Ride the old bike two miles back home. Walk half a mile to Arlington station. Take the trolley back out to the bike shop (don’t forget all the National Guard watching this). Ride the new bike two miles home. Turn around and walk half a mile back to Hynes. Hop an MBTA bus to Central Square in Cambridge. Inhale a burrito. Walk to my meditation center for my Tuesday night practice group. Meditate for an hour, then socialize a bit. Walk back to Central and hop the MBTA bus back to Hynes. Walk down to the Fenway Whole Foods, since the two grocery stores that are nearer to me are in the lockdown zone. Too late; they’re closed, so buy milk and OJ at a nearby CVS. Shlep those another mile back home. Collapse.

After just five hours’ sleep, Wednesday I went back to work. The lockdown zone shrank a bit more—down from 17 blocks to 12—freeing up Hereford, Berkeley, and Clarendon. Investigators concluded that the bombs had been constructed of pressure cookers, nails, and metal pellets, and announced that they had obtained surveillance video evidence showing a suspect.

Thursday President Obama (and many others) came to town for an inter-faith ceremony. That night the FBI released photographs of the two suspects.

Friday I was going to bike to work, because it was going to be the warmest day in more than six months, but that plan came to a crashing halt when I learned that shortly after the photos had been released, the bombers had engaged the police in firefights in Cambridge and Watertown, and one of them had been killed. The police had most of eastern Massachusetts completely locked down: no Amtrak, no MBTA, no commuter rail, no cabs, all businesses closed, and residents were told to stay indoors all day.

Despite live news broadcasts all day long, literally nothing happened in the 18 hours after the firefight. After a fruitless search of the neighborhood in Watertown where the surviving suspect was last seen, the police gave a press conference wherein they lifted the stay-put order. On the good side, that meant that the Amtrak would be running Saturday morning, when I had plans to travel to Maine.

But going outside sounded like the height of folly to me, because the second suspect was still armed and on the run. I guess the cops were probably hoping that he’d just turn up somewhere.

Which, as it turns out, was exactly what happened. A man just outside the cordoned-off part of Watertown found the remaining fugitive injured and semi-conscious, hidden in a shrink-wrapped yacht in his backyard, and the police came and took him into custody.

With the second suspect on the way to the hospital, the whole area burst out in celebrations. Of course, even despite the all-clear and the police high-fiving one another and the T being opened, Copley Square MBTA station remained closed, and the entire 12-block area around my apartment was still off-limits to the public.

That pretty much killed the day Friday.

On Saturday I did manage to get out of town on the Downeaster, and returned again on Sunday night. Copley and my neighborhood still off limits.

Monday. Still off limits. On the way home from work, I stopped at the grocery store, then lugged my provisions a mile and a half home. But the FBI turned the site back over to the city of Boston.

Tuesday. Still off limits. CIMC had a special evening gathering, led by the three guiding teachers.

Finally, on Wednesday morning they opened things up. After nine days of being unable to use my MBTA station or cross my neighborhood, the marathon (in both senses of that word) was finally over!

So that’s what happened. Now for a few thoughts…

One oddity is that I remember having the thought—sometime in the week leading up to the marathon—that we hadn’t had any major national emergencies in a long time, and that we were probably due. I don’t recall what prompted that thought, but I am certain it happened.

Although thinking back on it, Back Bay has been through a lot lately. We just got through a region-wide road closure due to a massive blizzard, but before that we spent 48 hours without power after a substation failure, and a week without drinking water when a 10-foot water main broke out in Weston. And then there were hurricanes Sandy and Irene.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t do more to help other people over the past week, to put my compassion practice into action. While I was probably right in telling myself that I wasn’t needed at the bomb scene, I probably could have helped stranded runners or traumatized spectators. But I guess there’s something to learn from my inaction, and hopefully I’ll do a better job next time.

On the other hand, one close friend said it was unexpectedly thoughtful of me to let people know that I was okay. And another friend used the word “compassion” as one of the three things that she thought I epitomized. So that was mildly reassuring.

Speaking of compassion and first responders, I saw an interesting reaction to the bombing that spoke eloquently to me about how men’s manifestations of love and compassion go unseen and unacknowledged. Here:

I had an amazing insight about men. This one insight seems life-changing to me: “Acts of heroism are acts of love.”
 
Why is this life changing? Because I don’t think the narrative out there right now is that men are constantly involved in deep, fundamentally good, acts of love. All the time. Men are not talked about, as a group, as being demonstrative of their love. Of being ongoing catalysts for acts of goodness. And yet they do that all the time. I think the narrative is that men take heroic actions because they are told it’s a role they must play, because men are “supposed” to be strong, supposed to be brave. Because they are “manning up” the way they were taught to. If love is talked about with men, it is in the context of sexuality. When men are called “lovers”, it is often code for “womanizers”. But men act in love, and show that love, all the time. For some unfathomable reason, we call it something else.
 
I don’t think men get enough credit for love.

I think my meditation practice really helped me deal with a situation that would otherwise produce a lot of anxiety and emotional discomfort. While I saw and acknowledged my own emotions, I was much more intrigued by the reactions of the people around me.

For several days, the main question on people’s minds was the search for “who”: who did it?

Lots of people either undertook their own search for the culprit based on photographs that had been posted or formulated their own opinions based on little to no data. But realistically, no private citizen was going to identify the bomber; that’s what we pay our law enforcement agencies for. Get out of the way and let them do their job!

As my teacher pointed out, this compulsion comes entirely from mental discomfort, because the identity of the bomber has absolutely no relevance for most of us. In fact, if the bomber had never been found, it would have made absolutely no material difference in most people’s lives. So why did they spend so much mental energy and anguish trying to answer this question? That kind of desperate, undisciplined thought is the symptom of someone with an undeveloped sense of self-awareness.

Then, after it was learned that the suspects were pretty average Cambridge kids, the next question everyone was asking was “why”: why would someone do such a thing? This was prevalent both in my family as well as from other practitioners at CIMC, and it really surprised me.

I think the very question is indicative of cultural bias. While many of us say that we respect and value other cultures—especially in a highly educated, multi-cultural town like Cambridge—very few of us understand what that means in practice. It’s frustrating that I have to spell it out, but people from other cultures will have different values! They won’t be the same as ours.

While a Buddhist might value non-harming above all other things, and your average American Christian might value order and stability, someone from a foreign culture might consider those less important than individual freedom or cultural preservation or economic fairness. Why would someone bomb innocent civilians? Because it’s important to them within the framework of their values.

I don’t understand what is so mysterious about the fact that other people might have different values than yourself. Why is that so incomprehensible? But people really seem to operate on this unspoken assumption that everyone shares their values. That’s not true even within a family, never mind across vast ethnic, religious, geographic, and political divisions!

I heard the phrase “I don’t understand” so many times that I wanted to grab people and shake them. Of course you don’t understand! You’re not *trying* to understand. A criminal’s actions only make sense when viewed through *their* value system; of course it doesn’t make sense if you insist on viewing it through your very different values. That’s like wondering why birds don’t save their energy and just drive south like the rest of us, rather than fly. Of course it doesn’t make sense if you insist on interpreting bird behavior using human norms and values!

But this question of “why” is even broader than that. Sure, any seemingly “inexplicable” act (criminal or otherwise) can be partially explained by understanding the values espoused by the protagonist. But what about acts of nature or acts of “god”? Aren’t people are just as prone to ask “why” in response to a tsunami or a wildfire or a landslide or a cancer diagnosis?

I find this baffling, because change is inevitable and life is very fragile. These aren’t just platitudes to make you feel better (in fact, they should make you feel quite insecure). But more importantly, these are the incontrovertible base assumptions and conditions that we live under! There doesn’t need to be a *reason* for something bad to happen, because bad things are a part of life, an indisputable fact. All this breast-beating and asking why they happen is like asking why nitrogen happens or bemoaning the law of gravity. If you are asking why it happened, you really need to reexamine the mistaken assumptions you live by.

In contrast, I suppose I should point out something uplifting, too. With so much focus on the bombers and their actions, consider the correspondingly much greater number of people and acts of kindness and compassion that took place over the past week. We should all be heartened by the vastly larger outpouring of support for those affected.

I want to particularly highlight two tweets that crossed my feed shortly after the bombing. In the midst of the chaos and terror, many people thought of giving blood to help the injured. But still, I was amazed by this:

Red Cross reporting sufficient blood in banks at this time. Some marathoners ran directly to MGH to donate after blasts.

I can’t imagine finishing a marathon, running an extra mile, and then having blood drawn. Simply amazing! Not especially smart, but amazing.

But I really felt a deep pride in my city when I read the next tweet. How does Boston respond to a terrorist attack? Like this:

I have no idea how we are supposed to react to something like this, other than love each other more.

I’ve always loved this city. It’s a wonderful mix of ambition and compassion, competitiveness and brotherhood, pride of place and openness, history and innovation, intelligence and grit, vibrant city culture and outdoor activities for the athletically inclined. Boston isn’t perfect, but it strives mightily to be the best. And contrary to the intentions of these terrorist wannabes, the marathon bombing they undertook did something very special: it provided us with a rare opportunity to demonstrate love for our city and our fellow Bostonians, and it bound this great community together more tightly than ever before.

I love that dirty water. Aw, Boston you’re my home.

Heck, I’m so moved I might even include Cambridge…

Want to feel old? Just take a look behind you…

I’ve been blogging long enough now to post the third installment in my series of posts remembering people, places, and things that Boston has lost since I moved in.

Nostalgia. Memorabilia. Whatever synonym you use, it’s likely to evoke the same bittersweet morose feeling of loss. So many good times, so many memories, all gone to seed.

At the same time, a city—or at least a living one—needs to change, grow, and evolve to stay interesting and vital. Still, it’s hard to feel as sanguine about new, unfamiliar places as the comfortable, memory-filled things they replace.

This week provided a particularly sad example, in the sudden shuttering of the venerable Boston Phoenix, a free alternative tabloid newspaper that guided two and a half generations of young adults through the vibrant if chaotic maelstrom of Boston youth culture.

The Phoenix was the heart of my Boston experience through my 20s, 30s, and 40s. Clubs, bands, restaurants, classical concerts, lectures, readings, exhibits… If it was worth doing—even if it was way too outré for the mainstream media to touch—you’d find it listed in the Phoenix.

Although I’ve aged and my life has become more mainstream, losing the Phoenix is no less painful. If nothing else, it represented a connection, and sense of continuity with the person I used to be. It was one of the threads that still connected me with that other Ornoth, the younger, more social, and more visceral one whom I grew out of.

But it’s just the most recent example of the Buddhist law of impermanence. Here are a few others, just to remind you that nothing lasts forever, and the great danger of binding your happiness to something impermanent.

If you’re interested in other stuff that Boston has lost, check out the previous posts in this series: one from 2009 and another from 2005.

Updates: All Asia Cafe, Cambridgeport Saloon, Thailand Cafe, Charley's restaurant on Newbury Street, Crossroads Irish Pub, Bostone Pizza, An Tua Nua pub, Anthony's Pier 4, the Purple Shamrock, Hilltop Steak House in Saugus, Hi-Fi Pizza in Central, Calumet Photo, Steve's Greek restaurant on Newbury Street, Daisy Buchanan's on Newbury Street, India Samraat, Cactus Club, J. Pace & Son North End grocery, Amtrak's ticket office in Back Bay station, Louis Boston, Louie the Tricycle Guy, International Bike in Brighton & Newton, Forum restaurant on Boylston, Bayside Expo Center, MakerBot on Newbury Street, TT the Bears nightclub, Tedeschi convenience stores, the entire food court at the Prudential mall, Berk's shoes in Harvard Square, Church nightclub (formerly Linwood Grill), Scissors & Pie pretentious pizza hovel. Impending closures: Johnny D's, Medieval Manor.