05/04/2024
“We’re on holy ground” he would say as we drove through Hopkington, the starting place of the Boston Marathon.
Holy ground, a place of beginning.
Twenty years later, I walk the stairs of the campus library. I turn, as I did back then, and look for him.
“I’m going to Tufts,” I said. It was a gut feeling. And he took it in, real like scripture.
“Go dumbos!!!”
It was the Jumbos but we’d work on that. Many times.
I wander the campus today, roll my hands in my coat pocket. They’ve spent the last two days feeling kidneys and livers, intestines, duodenums. Learning to feel skin, fat, rib, spleen. They are learning to trust their gut.
I remember these are the same hands that clung around his neck, the sudden gust of fear when move in day finally arrived. They are the ones that will keep seasoning, deepening, refining.
The ghosts of my past, my future, all here with me.
I just think it’s so beautiful when life shows you all that the viscera knows. The starting ground is holy. Just remember, trust your gut.
