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Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "beirut"
War and peace and the meaning of heels
The main reason I went to Beirut earlier this month was so I could see “The Dark Knight Rises” four more times at 35,000 feet. Four of the six flights I was on offered the movie as an entertainment option, and I figured if I watched the ending four times, I could finally decide once and for all whether Alfred the butler’s vision at the end is real or imagined. (See how careful I was not to spoil the ending for the seven people left who haven’t seen the film?)
This was my second visit to Beirut this year, and it has to be one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever seen. My impressions are founded on less than two weeks there over two visits, but I was telling my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian – who grew up there during the cataclysmic Lebanese Civil War and now lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he edits “The Armenian Weekly” – that I think of three things when I recall the city: A hotel, a cat, and the scariest shoes Christian Louboutin ever designed. On some level, in my psyche if not in reality, they are related.
First, the hotel. Actually, it is the shell-cratered husk of a hotel. In 1975, Holiday Inn opened a towering skyscraper a block from the Mediterranean Sea with an elegant, revolving restaurant at the top. Within months of the start of the Civil War, rival militias fought for the high ground and the hotel was about as high as you could get in that corner of the city. Although much of Beirut has been rebuilt, the Holiday Inn remains as it was in the worst of the fighting: Thirty stories of empty concrete that are dotted with blackened shell holes. I saw the Holiday Inn a lot on my recent visit, because it’s next-door to the Phoenicia, the five-star hotel where I was staying. Nearly forty years after the first mortar carved the first cavity and took the first life in the building, it remains a striking reminder of the violence we as people can inflict on one another. It is among the most powerful anti-war monuments I have ever seen.
And then there is the cat. She was a tortoise-shell the size of a poodle and I would have guessed she tipped the scales at 15 pounds. The feline was on the campus of the American University of Beirut, one of the 150 or so cats that the school’s Animal Welfare Club feeds and neuters. A student who was giving me a tour pointed her out to me and said, laughing, “They have all the benefits of AUB, but none of the mid-terms. They’re so spoiled, they can’t make it outside the confines of the university more than a few hours.” I asked what happened to the cats during the Civil War. He wasn’t sure, but said, “We were the only university to remain open throughout the fighting. And they’ve always been a part of the campus culture.”
Finally, there are the shoes. Not far from my hotel, I came across a Christian Louboutin shoe store. Louboutin is a French designer who either hates or loves women’s feet. I have no idea. I just know that the heels of his shoes look like weapons and cost as much as the monthly rent on a lot of apartments. I picked up one pair, wondering if my 19-year-old daughter might like them, and saw they cost nearly $2,000. (I bought her a hat instead.) Most women in Lebanon don’t have the money to buy shoes that pricey, but high heels matter more in Beirut than in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles. They matter a lot more. Is this a fashion hedonism that’s also linked to the nation’s horrific Civil War – the idea that today we will wear Louboutin because tomorrow we may die? Maybe. Maybe not.
According to the Beirut newspapers, roughly 130,000 refugees so far have streamed into the nation from Syria, escaping the nightmarish war that has engulfed that neighbor. I asked many of the Lebanese I met whether the violence there is going to spread into Lebanon. Some said yes, some said no.
My favorite answer, however, came from a driver who brought me back one night to the Phoenicia. “I don’t think the war will come here,” he said, pointing up at the nearby Holiday Inn. “I hope we’ve learned what can happen.”
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 16, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” goes on sale on July 16, 2013. You can add it your Goodreads "To Read" queue.)
This was my second visit to Beirut this year, and it has to be one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever seen. My impressions are founded on less than two weeks there over two visits, but I was telling my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian – who grew up there during the cataclysmic Lebanese Civil War and now lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he edits “The Armenian Weekly” – that I think of three things when I recall the city: A hotel, a cat, and the scariest shoes Christian Louboutin ever designed. On some level, in my psyche if not in reality, they are related.
First, the hotel. Actually, it is the shell-cratered husk of a hotel. In 1975, Holiday Inn opened a towering skyscraper a block from the Mediterranean Sea with an elegant, revolving restaurant at the top. Within months of the start of the Civil War, rival militias fought for the high ground and the hotel was about as high as you could get in that corner of the city. Although much of Beirut has been rebuilt, the Holiday Inn remains as it was in the worst of the fighting: Thirty stories of empty concrete that are dotted with blackened shell holes. I saw the Holiday Inn a lot on my recent visit, because it’s next-door to the Phoenicia, the five-star hotel where I was staying. Nearly forty years after the first mortar carved the first cavity and took the first life in the building, it remains a striking reminder of the violence we as people can inflict on one another. It is among the most powerful anti-war monuments I have ever seen.
And then there is the cat. She was a tortoise-shell the size of a poodle and I would have guessed she tipped the scales at 15 pounds. The feline was on the campus of the American University of Beirut, one of the 150 or so cats that the school’s Animal Welfare Club feeds and neuters. A student who was giving me a tour pointed her out to me and said, laughing, “They have all the benefits of AUB, but none of the mid-terms. They’re so spoiled, they can’t make it outside the confines of the university more than a few hours.” I asked what happened to the cats during the Civil War. He wasn’t sure, but said, “We were the only university to remain open throughout the fighting. And they’ve always been a part of the campus culture.”
Finally, there are the shoes. Not far from my hotel, I came across a Christian Louboutin shoe store. Louboutin is a French designer who either hates or loves women’s feet. I have no idea. I just know that the heels of his shoes look like weapons and cost as much as the monthly rent on a lot of apartments. I picked up one pair, wondering if my 19-year-old daughter might like them, and saw they cost nearly $2,000. (I bought her a hat instead.) Most women in Lebanon don’t have the money to buy shoes that pricey, but high heels matter more in Beirut than in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles. They matter a lot more. Is this a fashion hedonism that’s also linked to the nation’s horrific Civil War – the idea that today we will wear Louboutin because tomorrow we may die? Maybe. Maybe not.
According to the Beirut newspapers, roughly 130,000 refugees so far have streamed into the nation from Syria, escaping the nightmarish war that has engulfed that neighbor. I asked many of the Lebanese I met whether the violence there is going to spread into Lebanon. Some said yes, some said no.
My favorite answer, however, came from a driver who brought me back one night to the Phoenicia. “I don’t think the war will come here,” he said, pointing up at the nearby Holiday Inn. “I hope we’ve learned what can happen.”
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 16, 2012. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” goes on sale on July 16, 2013. You can add it your Goodreads "To Read" queue.)
Forrest Gump Goes to Beirut
We all have a little Forrest Gump in us. A bit of Leonard Zelig.
We’ve all had those moments when, suddenly, we are not merely witnesses to an instant fraught with meaning, but we are participants in the scene. We see ourselves both in the minute and with a cinematic distance: Camera pulls back wide to reveal the majesty of the spectacle, the sheer grandeur. And there, much to our surprise, we see ourselves. We are at once in the moment, and an observer of it.
I had one of those experiences when I was in Beirut in December. I was in Lebanon as a guest of Hamazkayin and the Vahe Setian Publishing House. I had spent a week visiting universities and schools, and now I was in the Catholicosate in Antelias, meeting with His Holiness Aram I, before he and a pair of scholars were going to discuss my most recent novel, "The Sandcastle Girls," in front of a packed house of roughly 300 people. After the two of us had talked for 45 minutes in his office, we were summoned to Gulbenkian Hall, and here is where I went from Armenian-American novelist to Zelig or Gump. I started to walk toward the hall, but His Holiness put his hand on my shoulder and guided me into the line of Reverent Fathers beside him. Fourteen men in black cassocks and ceremonial vestments and…me. And thus, I walked into Gulbenkian beside Aram I, in a formal procession of Armenian priests.
It wasn’t the most terrifying moment of my professional life, but it was up there. It was also, however, among the most moving.
The reality is that my visit to the Lebanese-Armenian community—my second in 2012—was rich in memories like that.
There was my sobering conversation with the principal of one of the Armenian high schools where I spoke. I asked him how the students who had arrived from the cataclysm that has engulfed Aleppo were doing. “They are accustomed to studying physics and chemistry in Arabic,” he answered. “We teach those subjects here in French, so that has been a struggle for them.” I told him I had meant, how are they doing emotionally? How are they coping with the trauma of upheaval and civil war? He nodded gravely and said, “The ones who have both of their parents with them are doing better than those whose fathers are still in Aleppo, or whose mothers and fathers are both still in Aleppo.”
There was my visit to the Levon and Sofia Hagopian Armenian College—another high school, actually—in Bourj Hammoud. Friends of mine in the United States had told me that even though the Armenian students in Beirut might speak English, it was unlikely they would understand the nuances of my presentation. Not true. The very first question? A 16-year-old girl asked me, “Has writing this novel been healing for you personally? Emotionally?” Two other students had already finished the book by the time I arrived and wanted to discuss the ending with me with all the passion of readers in Los Angeles or Milwaukee or Watertown.
There was my afternoon in Anjar with the Lebanese Armenian Heritage Club from the American University of Beirut (AUB). I had spoken at AUB on a Friday night and was planning on making the second pilgrimage of my life to Anjar on Sunday. Franz Werfel’s "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" is among my very favorite novels, and so I wanted to return to the village where the descendants of the Musa Dagh resistance now live. (For those unfamiliar with the story, in July 1915, roughly 4,000 Armenians from the 6 villages on the mountain refused to be resettled, knowing that “resettlement” was a euphemism for “extermination.” From atop Musa Dagh they held off the Turkish army for 53 days, before they were rescued by a part of the French fleet, which saw their red cross distress flag dangling off the Mediterranean Sea side of the cliff.) Three of the AUB students offered to join me, including Razmig Boyadjian, the great-grandson of one of the martyrs of the mountain. He showed me his great-grandfather’s name on a replica of the canister that once held the man’s ashes. Meanwhile, moments before I spoke to some of the citizens of Anjar, we heard shelling, as Syrian opposition forces made a foray into the Bekaa Valley, trying—and failing—to steal Lebanese Army weapons.
And orchestrating my week was Hagop Havatian of Hamazkayin, arguably the hardest-working man in Beirut. Thanks to him, I was also able to bring the story of "The Sandcastle Girls" and the realities of the Armenian Genocide onto Arabic television and Arabic newspapers, reminding the country of why the Armenian minority today is such an important cultural and economic part of modern Lebanon.
The culmination of the trip, of course, was my visit to the cathedral and the Catholicosate in Antelias. The reality is that as a novelist, I meet a lot of extraordinary people. Most novelists do. But my audience with Aram I and the presentation in Gulbenkian Hall was, for me personally, a night for the ages.
I am not easily awed, but I was nervous. There are a variety of reasons for this, some grounded in the man’s profoundly important stature in the church, and others in the chasm-like gaps in my own religious training. Although my Armenian grandparents went to an Armenian church, my parents usually attended Episcopal churches in the New York City suburbs. Today I live next door (literally, right next door) to a Baptist church in Vermont, and have gone there happily for a quarter century. Nevertheless, my religious training has a long history of eccentricity. Exhibit A? Most of my training for confirmation when I was a 12-year-old at Trinity Episcopal Church in Stamford, Conn., revolved around Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” To this day, I still know an embarrassing amount of the libretto.
In any case, the idea that I was going to meet His Holiness certainly got my attention when I received the invitation back in September. I learned key phrases in Armenian and I drove my friend Khatchig Mouradian, the editor of this newspaper, a little crazy with my obsessive-compulsive insistence on practicing precisely how much I should bow when I met Aram I. And I asked Hagop Havatian to share with me which of His Holiness’s books I should read prior to our meeting. I did considerably more homework than before I had been confirmed three and a half decades earlier.
And yet, in hindsight, none of it was necessary. I never had to impress anyone because, pure and simple, everyone was so supportive of my visit. Everyone was appreciative of my attempt with The Sandcastle Girls to bring the story of the Armenian Genocide to readers who could not find Aleppo or Der-el-Zor—or even the Armenian nation—on a map. I remember sitting in Gulbenkian Hall, almost overwhelmed with gratitude, as Arda Ekmekji of Haigazian University was discussing where two of my favorite characters, Nevart and Hatoun, fit into the story and what their journeys in 1915 mean to all of us today.
Was this, too, a Forrest Gump-esque moment? Not at all. I had never in my life felt more like I belonged.
(This article originally appeared in "The Armenian Weekly" on December 17, 2012.)
We’ve all had those moments when, suddenly, we are not merely witnesses to an instant fraught with meaning, but we are participants in the scene. We see ourselves both in the minute and with a cinematic distance: Camera pulls back wide to reveal the majesty of the spectacle, the sheer grandeur. And there, much to our surprise, we see ourselves. We are at once in the moment, and an observer of it.
I had one of those experiences when I was in Beirut in December. I was in Lebanon as a guest of Hamazkayin and the Vahe Setian Publishing House. I had spent a week visiting universities and schools, and now I was in the Catholicosate in Antelias, meeting with His Holiness Aram I, before he and a pair of scholars were going to discuss my most recent novel, "The Sandcastle Girls," in front of a packed house of roughly 300 people. After the two of us had talked for 45 minutes in his office, we were summoned to Gulbenkian Hall, and here is where I went from Armenian-American novelist to Zelig or Gump. I started to walk toward the hall, but His Holiness put his hand on my shoulder and guided me into the line of Reverent Fathers beside him. Fourteen men in black cassocks and ceremonial vestments and…me. And thus, I walked into Gulbenkian beside Aram I, in a formal procession of Armenian priests.
It wasn’t the most terrifying moment of my professional life, but it was up there. It was also, however, among the most moving.
The reality is that my visit to the Lebanese-Armenian community—my second in 2012—was rich in memories like that.
There was my sobering conversation with the principal of one of the Armenian high schools where I spoke. I asked him how the students who had arrived from the cataclysm that has engulfed Aleppo were doing. “They are accustomed to studying physics and chemistry in Arabic,” he answered. “We teach those subjects here in French, so that has been a struggle for them.” I told him I had meant, how are they doing emotionally? How are they coping with the trauma of upheaval and civil war? He nodded gravely and said, “The ones who have both of their parents with them are doing better than those whose fathers are still in Aleppo, or whose mothers and fathers are both still in Aleppo.”
There was my visit to the Levon and Sofia Hagopian Armenian College—another high school, actually—in Bourj Hammoud. Friends of mine in the United States had told me that even though the Armenian students in Beirut might speak English, it was unlikely they would understand the nuances of my presentation. Not true. The very first question? A 16-year-old girl asked me, “Has writing this novel been healing for you personally? Emotionally?” Two other students had already finished the book by the time I arrived and wanted to discuss the ending with me with all the passion of readers in Los Angeles or Milwaukee or Watertown.
There was my afternoon in Anjar with the Lebanese Armenian Heritage Club from the American University of Beirut (AUB). I had spoken at AUB on a Friday night and was planning on making the second pilgrimage of my life to Anjar on Sunday. Franz Werfel’s "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" is among my very favorite novels, and so I wanted to return to the village where the descendants of the Musa Dagh resistance now live. (For those unfamiliar with the story, in July 1915, roughly 4,000 Armenians from the 6 villages on the mountain refused to be resettled, knowing that “resettlement” was a euphemism for “extermination.” From atop Musa Dagh they held off the Turkish army for 53 days, before they were rescued by a part of the French fleet, which saw their red cross distress flag dangling off the Mediterranean Sea side of the cliff.) Three of the AUB students offered to join me, including Razmig Boyadjian, the great-grandson of one of the martyrs of the mountain. He showed me his great-grandfather’s name on a replica of the canister that once held the man’s ashes. Meanwhile, moments before I spoke to some of the citizens of Anjar, we heard shelling, as Syrian opposition forces made a foray into the Bekaa Valley, trying—and failing—to steal Lebanese Army weapons.
And orchestrating my week was Hagop Havatian of Hamazkayin, arguably the hardest-working man in Beirut. Thanks to him, I was also able to bring the story of "The Sandcastle Girls" and the realities of the Armenian Genocide onto Arabic television and Arabic newspapers, reminding the country of why the Armenian minority today is such an important cultural and economic part of modern Lebanon.
The culmination of the trip, of course, was my visit to the cathedral and the Catholicosate in Antelias. The reality is that as a novelist, I meet a lot of extraordinary people. Most novelists do. But my audience with Aram I and the presentation in Gulbenkian Hall was, for me personally, a night for the ages.
I am not easily awed, but I was nervous. There are a variety of reasons for this, some grounded in the man’s profoundly important stature in the church, and others in the chasm-like gaps in my own religious training. Although my Armenian grandparents went to an Armenian church, my parents usually attended Episcopal churches in the New York City suburbs. Today I live next door (literally, right next door) to a Baptist church in Vermont, and have gone there happily for a quarter century. Nevertheless, my religious training has a long history of eccentricity. Exhibit A? Most of my training for confirmation when I was a 12-year-old at Trinity Episcopal Church in Stamford, Conn., revolved around Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” To this day, I still know an embarrassing amount of the libretto.
In any case, the idea that I was going to meet His Holiness certainly got my attention when I received the invitation back in September. I learned key phrases in Armenian and I drove my friend Khatchig Mouradian, the editor of this newspaper, a little crazy with my obsessive-compulsive insistence on practicing precisely how much I should bow when I met Aram I. And I asked Hagop Havatian to share with me which of His Holiness’s books I should read prior to our meeting. I did considerably more homework than before I had been confirmed three and a half decades earlier.
And yet, in hindsight, none of it was necessary. I never had to impress anyone because, pure and simple, everyone was so supportive of my visit. Everyone was appreciative of my attempt with The Sandcastle Girls to bring the story of the Armenian Genocide to readers who could not find Aleppo or Der-el-Zor—or even the Armenian nation—on a map. I remember sitting in Gulbenkian Hall, almost overwhelmed with gratitude, as Arda Ekmekji of Haigazian University was discussing where two of my favorite characters, Nevart and Hatoun, fit into the story and what their journeys in 1915 mean to all of us today.
Was this, too, a Forrest Gump-esque moment? Not at all. I had never in my life felt more like I belonged.
(This article originally appeared in "The Armenian Weekly" on December 17, 2012.)
What it means to be Boston Strong
It has been almost two weeks now since the Boston Marathon ended in a nightmarish terrorist attack; it has been nine days since Boston was paralyzed by a manhunt and Watertown was a battleground. The news cycles are moving on.
But among the elements of the story that will stay with me a long time is this: The reaction of my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian. Khatchig lives in Watertown and the firefight between Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev and the Boston police occurred in his neighborhood. When I woke up that Friday morning, April 19, and saw Watertown was in the news, I texted him to make sure he was safe. His response? “I just gave an interview to a newspaper in Turkey. I said I’m so used to explosions that I slept through them.”
Khatchig grew up in Beirut during that country’s cataclysmic civil war. He spent so many nights in bomb shelters teaching his younger sisters to play chess – taking their mind off the reality that their home was, once again, being shelled – that both girls would grow into Lebanese chess champions and win numerous regional and international tournaments.
Likewise, there are my friends from Israel who, at different points in their lives, knew that any moment a bus might burst into flames or a missile might explode in the street.
Obviously our country is not exempt from terror. At different times in the past two decades, we have been targeted by foreigners and by our own citizens. We all know the worst examples of each: The attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan on the one hand, and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, on the other.
And we will be attacked again. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security may unravel and stop a thousand schemes, but eventually they will miss one – as they did with the brothers Tsarnaev. This is not a criticism of either organization; it’s only an acknowledgment that perfection is impossible in this game. We’re not talking nine innings; we’re talking every single day of every single year. And this is a very violent world.
But we don’t live under the shadow of terrorism the way some parts of the world do. We don’t for two reasons: First of all, because even though perfection is impossible, we come impressively close. Second, because even though we know the violently alienated are out there, we don’t let them win. We go about our lives.
Sometimes, I’m frustrated with our country. Most recently I was aggravated when we failed to achieve meaningful gun control, despite the horrific slaughter at an elementary school in Connecticut last December. But more times than not I am proud of who we are and what we accomplish. The heroism of the runners and doctors and first responders that followed the Boston Marathon bombing is another legacy to that tragic moment in our history. So was the work of our law enforcement officials. The spirit of Boston in the days after the attack has left me moved and inspired.
Which brings me back to my friend in Watertown. Khatchig is the editor of “The Armenian Weekly” and a genocide scholar. If anyone understands the historical context of violence and terror, it’s a genocide scholar. If anyone understands a world where people detonate bombs designed to kill innocent people, it’s a fellow who grew up in Beirut. He also happens to be one of the smartest people I know. This was his response when I asked him what it felt like to witness the sort of violence he knew from his childhood and young adulthood in Lebanon occur in his neighborhood in Massachusetts:
“It is when hatred and violence strike close to home – whether home is Beirut or Watertown – that our true commitment to the values and principles on which we pride ourselves is tested. Terror is defeated by upholding those principles – across the board and all the time – and not by renouncing them with the excuse of making home a safer place. That, for me, is homeland security.”
It will be long after the news cycles have moved on that we have fully regained our equilibrium. In the meantime, I will take pride in the people of eastern Massachusetts, and comfort in the courageous way they have, pure and simple, gone on living. That’s what it means to win. That’s what it means to be Boston Strong.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on April 28, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 9.)
But among the elements of the story that will stay with me a long time is this: The reaction of my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian. Khatchig lives in Watertown and the firefight between Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev and the Boston police occurred in his neighborhood. When I woke up that Friday morning, April 19, and saw Watertown was in the news, I texted him to make sure he was safe. His response? “I just gave an interview to a newspaper in Turkey. I said I’m so used to explosions that I slept through them.”
Khatchig grew up in Beirut during that country’s cataclysmic civil war. He spent so many nights in bomb shelters teaching his younger sisters to play chess – taking their mind off the reality that their home was, once again, being shelled – that both girls would grow into Lebanese chess champions and win numerous regional and international tournaments.
Likewise, there are my friends from Israel who, at different points in their lives, knew that any moment a bus might burst into flames or a missile might explode in the street.
Obviously our country is not exempt from terror. At different times in the past two decades, we have been targeted by foreigners and by our own citizens. We all know the worst examples of each: The attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan on the one hand, and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, on the other.
And we will be attacked again. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security may unravel and stop a thousand schemes, but eventually they will miss one – as they did with the brothers Tsarnaev. This is not a criticism of either organization; it’s only an acknowledgment that perfection is impossible in this game. We’re not talking nine innings; we’re talking every single day of every single year. And this is a very violent world.
But we don’t live under the shadow of terrorism the way some parts of the world do. We don’t for two reasons: First of all, because even though perfection is impossible, we come impressively close. Second, because even though we know the violently alienated are out there, we don’t let them win. We go about our lives.
Sometimes, I’m frustrated with our country. Most recently I was aggravated when we failed to achieve meaningful gun control, despite the horrific slaughter at an elementary school in Connecticut last December. But more times than not I am proud of who we are and what we accomplish. The heroism of the runners and doctors and first responders that followed the Boston Marathon bombing is another legacy to that tragic moment in our history. So was the work of our law enforcement officials. The spirit of Boston in the days after the attack has left me moved and inspired.
Which brings me back to my friend in Watertown. Khatchig is the editor of “The Armenian Weekly” and a genocide scholar. If anyone understands the historical context of violence and terror, it’s a genocide scholar. If anyone understands a world where people detonate bombs designed to kill innocent people, it’s a fellow who grew up in Beirut. He also happens to be one of the smartest people I know. This was his response when I asked him what it felt like to witness the sort of violence he knew from his childhood and young adulthood in Lebanon occur in his neighborhood in Massachusetts:
“It is when hatred and violence strike close to home – whether home is Beirut or Watertown – that our true commitment to the values and principles on which we pride ourselves is tested. Terror is defeated by upholding those principles – across the board and all the time – and not by renouncing them with the excuse of making home a safer place. That, for me, is homeland security.”
It will be long after the news cycles have moved on that we have fully regained our equilibrium. In the meantime, I will take pride in the people of eastern Massachusetts, and comfort in the courageous way they have, pure and simple, gone on living. That’s what it means to win. That’s what it means to be Boston Strong.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on April 28, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 9.)
