After my sophomore year of college, my parents gave me their 1988 Plymouth Reliant. We lived in the suburbs, I needed a car to get a job, and my parents are very kind people. The car was a slate gray four-door sedan, one of the ubiquitous boxy K-cars that defined the late 80s the way softly rounded cloud cars defined the following decade. It had aged well, as K cars did, and though it was well past its warranty in both miles and years, it was in good shape. The vinyl was sun faded, the steering wheel worn pale in a couple of places by years of sweaty palms, but the car was basically intact.

Except for the ceiling. The goddamn ceiling.

The Plymouth Reliant was only one of many cars with a fabric upholstered ceiling. The trouble with this is that eventually time and weather would take their toll, and the fabric would begin to fall away from the ceiling. It started as a small bubble, near the interior dome light, but before long the whole ceiling was hanging down, sad, like the doughy belly of a retired athlete. I tried numerous things to try and reattach the fabric to the roof, but eventually it always drooped back down, growing progressively worse. It brushed my head when I drove, block my vision in the rear-view mirror, and forced friends in the back seat to duck down. But the worst was yet to come.

Eventually, the first tear appeared in the gray fabric. Then it grew. Before long the fabric, instead of drooping like a bubble, hung like ratty curtains from the ceiling of the car. Behind the upholstery was a thin layer of foam padding that, perhaps thanks to its age, flaked apart and fell like dirty dandruff onto the seats, floor, and clothing of riders. Once again I tried methods of fixing the upholstery–super glue, thumbtacks, double-sided tape–but nothing worked. Periodically someone would snag something on the fabric, and a loud tearing sound would signal that the problem was getting worse.

This was a frequent problem. In the late 90s, many kids in their late teens and early 20s were driving their parents hand-me-down K cars, and I knew several people who’d had the same problem. No one ever found a solution that I heard about–I knew one guy who just ripped out all the upholstery, scraped away the flaky padding once and for all, and drove around under the bare steel ceiling of his car, exposed wires running back and forth overhead.

That summer I played roller hockey most Saturdays with some friends. Our rink of choice was a converted tennis court at the local middle school. The parking lot was right beside the rink, and with the summer heat I generally left the windows open and the doors unlocked. The only problem was that the heat and the breeze sometimes made the ceiling worse.

One day, after hours spent sweating into my goalie gear under a heavy summer sun, I went back and found the ceiling was MUCH worse. I lost it. I don’t remember if I had a bad game that day, or if the heat made me cranky, or if I’d just had it with that damned upholstery, but I started tearing it all down. Flakes of gray foam snow rained down around me, but I didn’t stop. Ape-like, I grabbed handfulls of tattered upholstery and yanking it, eliciting loud tearing sounds as it came away from the trim.

That’s when I noticed the wide eyes on the other hockey guys. For a second I thought it was my outburst that shocked them, but after a minute I got my bearings, and noticed the nearly-identical slate gray Plymouth Reliant parked a few spots to my left.

I wasn’t sitting in my car.

Luckily, the guy whose car I defaced was another of the hockey guys, and he had a sense of humor about it. He’d had it with the upholstery too, and said he’d thought about doing exactly what I did. I offered to let him have at my ceiling, but he passed.

Not long after that I was sideswiped at a stop sign by a very careless girl on her cell phone, and the gray Reliant K was retired.

Photo from Flickr user aldenjewell, used under Creative Commons license.

#tootiredtopostaboutguncontrol

“Otherwise the terrorists win,” he said. I told him we’d be back in two years. Liz’s next marathon is Philadelphia in November, which is too late to qualify for Boston 2014.

The morning had been pretty calm. We left the television off and focused our conversation on the race, not on what happened after the finish. Every marathon is a hero’s quest, and every runner has a story to tell. Liz ran with her friend Cip, and their story was about pushing through calf cramps and mental exhaustion to get to the finish. They blew kisses to the girls at Wellesley and spotted a woman runner near the foot of the Newton Hills who had pooped her pants. By mile 25 Cip swore this would be her last marathon, but when they turned the corner onto Boylston Street and the finish line came into view, they both burst into happy tears and she changed her mind.

Being outside among other humans was much harder, emotionally. To get to Back Bay we had to walk along Commonwealth Avenue, parallel to the finish area and just a block or so away. The finish area is still closed as a crime scene, and soldiers and police patrol every intersection. Media satellite trucks crowded Commonwealth Avenue. The national media had taken over the intersection of Arlington and Boylston, setting up impromptu studios with hot lights and stools for their anchors. Behind them, a mob gathered to look up Boylston street, which remains as it was yesterday afternoon, scattered with debris and damage. Nearby were piles of the mylar blankets runners receive as they finish, silver on one side and printed with blue-on-white Boston Athletic Association logos on the other.

The locals had taken to random acts of kindness. As we walked along Commonwealth, a young woman gave Liz and Ben white roses and thanked them for running. That was the thing that hit me hardest, emotionally. People are just so damned nice after a tragedy. It always makes me cry.

Liz turned down two interview requests as we crossed Boylston Street. She’s too raw right now to tell her story, especially on camera. The blog post I wrote last night was picked up by a national press syndicate, thanks to an old high school friend. I had to think about that one, just as I did before publishing the blog at all. I see some people and companies who are treating this as an opportunity for self-promotion, and that’s the last thing I want to do right now. Being present, I feel like I have an opportunity–perhaps a responsibility–to help tell the story. I put myself in the story because this is a personal blog, and I’m not writing it as a journalist. But it’s not about me.

Outside the train station, we spoke with two guys selling newspapers. It’s an annual tradition that the local Boston papers publish the full list of runner results. I bought a Herald, though I was reluctant. Photos on the cover were of people at the bomb site crying, and the headline was something about “Terror.” We’ll stick it in a bag somewhere and pull it out in a few years when the emotions aren’t so fresh.

Among all the craziness in Boston, the reporters and the police and the soldiers, there were hundreds of people going about their daily lives. A woman walked her two golden retrievers past the satellite trucks, while families with strollers passed the other way. There were runners on the sidewalks. One guy blew past us with his shirt off, making the most of a warm and sunny day. In the end, I guess, that’s the best thing to take away from this–when your world looks crazy and unfamiliar, the best thing to do is keep on running.

We will be back for sure. I sincerely doubt I can ever run fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon, but Liz wants to PR in 2015. Hopefully that train ride home will be more cheerful.

I was at Massachusetts and Commonwealth Avenues, about six blocks or so from the finish line, when the explosions detonated. I was talking to a friend of Liz’s who had finished about an hour earlier, and we both heard the bombs. We wondered aloud what the noise might have been, but assumed it was something benign. From that distance it might have been a truck dropping its tailgate, or a collision. Living in New York City sort of desensitizes you to loud noises.

I went and got a burrito for Liz, and while I was paying I started getting text messages about explosions and lost limbs. I didn’t know where Liz was, but I knew the timing was close. I spent about ten minutes telling myself not to freak out, and Liz called to say she was okay. Freaked out, traumatized, but okay. The first bomb went off just behind her, and as she fled she looked back and saw the second explosion.

I make no light of this. Three people are dead, and more will likely die. No one knows how many will lose limbs. If this were any other race, I would have been at the finish line to watch for Liz, and I may have been a victim myself. It was only the fact that Boston’s finish area gets so crowded that dissuaded me. As of today, odd as it is to consider, Liz and I are survivors of a terrorist attack.

Liz evacuated to her running partner’s hotel, about a mile and a half from ours. Around 3:30 I made the walk to meet her. The city streets and alleys were jammed with tens of thousands of runners in their shorts and race bibs, clutching silver mylar blankets and moving in a slow parade toward Boston Common. With major streets shut down, they were pushed into narrow alleyways. Most of them hadn’t finished their race, and didn’t know where to go next. The city was eerily silent, save for the pervasive sirens and the quiet voices of those checking in with loved ones on their cell phones. In Boston Common I passed a crowd of race medical staff, half of whom were crying. Few spoke.

What’s important is we are okay. We may suffer stress, we may have some PTSD, but we’re alive, we have all our limbs, and we can get better. Other people cannot say that, and our sympathies go out to all of the victims, whatever their harm. The Boston Marathon, and race culture in general, will bear scars for a very, very long time. Already I have friends wondering whether they will ever race again, or whether the fear will keep them away. While I wasn’t personally a victim of 9/11, I’ll say now exactly what I said then: We cannot be afraid. I know it’s hard to go on with our lives, and I admit the next time I line up in a race corral, my mind will return to this day. But if we live in fear, the bad guys win. We are, after all, the Land of the Brave, and as someone wiser than me once said, it’s impossible to be courageous if you aren’t first afraid.

There’s been speculation already about the culprit behind this attack. I’m not going to join in the speculation, nor am I going to repeat it. My hope is that the perpetrator is caught soon, and that all of us can start to understand what motivates a person to inflict this kind of harm and terror. What justifies the random murder of another person’s child, another person’s parent or sibling, or the maiming of a complete stranger, I will never understand.