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Posts Tagged ‘patriots day’

Funny how quickly the photos pile up in beautiful weather. Winter days offer fewer opportunities, unless there’s a big snowstorm. Most of today’s pictures illustrate how I am drawn to spring’s strong sunlight.

Sunshine highlights the candles offered by the Barrow Bookstore, a shop featuring used books and much more — for example, birdhouses made from books.

I have a couple shots of people getting ready for the Patriots Day parade, which is always a big deal here. (Well, unless there’s a pandemic.) “The shot heard ’round the world,” usually credited with being the first shot of the American Revolution, happened at the North Bridge in our town, April 19, 1775. This year I managed to get up there in time to join the crowd watching the reenactment. Lots of noise and smoke and harmless musket shots.

I have no idea why a pine cone is nailed into a tree, but my camera is always drawn to oddball things.

The Toad Abode is at a community garden in Massachusetts, and the flowering trees are in Rhode Island.

From sunlight to dark: the moving musical Titanic, sung by some of the strongest voices I have heard since Covid. We weren’t allowed to take pictures during the show, but they put up a couple of their haunting slides before the show and at intermission. I guess you know what happened at that longitude and latitude. So many people to blame! So much hubris!

Having not been to theater for a long time, I managed to attend three shows in one week, all masked up, of course. I saw my youngest grandchild in a production of The Wizard of Oz. She had written invitations to each child in her class, and many came. Then I attended Footloose with my eldest grandson, who had friends in the cast. And finally, I presented my vaccination card at our local community theater and enjoyed the Titanic along with a lot of other matinee-loving old folks.

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It’s Patriots Day. Actually, it should be April 19, but everything gets celebrated on Mondays now.

Concord is ready for its parade. In front of the library, the Boston Children’s Museum has posted the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere on wooden stakes. The grandstand is set up for the dignitaries. The vendors are out in force.

I picture Paul Revere coming back for the celebrations and wondering if his ride was for the freedom to buy cotton candy, fried dough, and Sponge Bob Square Pants balloons on a stick.

Kind of like the hobbits who had all the wild adventures coming home and being a bit nonplussed by the pedestrian preoccupations of Hobbiton.

Actually, I think the adventurers did think they had fought for the freedom to have pedestrian preoccupations.

stroy-walk-in-Concord

listen-and-you-shall-hear

it-was-12-by-the-clock

parade-vendor

horse-and-enactors

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Late Sunday night, Kevin, a colleague who is a bicyclist, completed the Midnight Ride.

It’s an event that started a few years ago when one guy suggested to some fellow bikers that they bike the Boston Marathon route the night before the big event.

Stacey Leasca of the Los Angeles Times has the story.

“For the last six years, the Midnight Marathon Bike Ride has covered the Boston Marathon course the night before the race, as a way for more Bostonians to take part.

” ‘It was a way for me, who is not a runner, to connect with Boston, to connect with all this marathon energy,’ said Greg Hum, the ride’s originator.

“Although the Boston Athletic Assn., which oversees the Boston Marathon, has never officially sanctioned the ride, it has become a celebrated tradition to help kick off Marathon Monday.

“The night before the 2013 race, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Assn. even provided riders with a special commuter train to get them to the start of the route.

“This year, however, race officials and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency asked that the ride be canceled, and the MBTA did not offer its Midnight Marathon train. …

“But the Midnight Marathon had momentum that he and the agencies could not derail.

“Once word spread that there would be no train from downtown Boston to the starting line, riders began organizing carpools, vans, trucks and even a few buses via social media to help get them to the start.”

Kevin said Hum really wasn’t an organizer, just a guy whose idea grew, and he didn’t know any way to call it off. So it happened. There were people cheering along the route, even that late. Kevin got home at 2 a.m., exhilarated. His toddler woke him bright and early on Patriots Day, the day closely associated with another midnight ride.

More here.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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When I first wrote about the Concord home of former slave Caesar Robbins, a group of concerned citizens had just raised enough money to save it from demolition and move it near the North Bridge (in the Minute Man National Historical Park). See that post here.

Quite a lot has happened since then, and it looks like the refurbished house should be open to the public soon, if not in time for Patriots Day 2012, celebrated today.

Concord was once a stop on the Underground Railway, so saving the first Concord home owned by a freed slave is in keeping with that history.

By the way, if you are my reader in Australia or South Korea, you may not know about Patriots Day, which is a big deal in most of New England. People here consider April 19, 1775, the start of the American Revolution, although there are other worthy claimants for that honor. Paul Revere and Samuel Prescott rode to warn colonists that the British were coming, and shots were fired in Concord and Lexington.

Nowadays the day is commemorated on the closest Monday. Schools and libraries close. The Boston Marathon is run. Parades and reenactments sprout all over the region. One of my colleagues gets up at crack of dawn to march between towns in costume, playing the fife. In spite of all the hoopla, there is something about it that touches people.

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