Springtime

The Boston Marathon Massacre, as I am sure it will come euphoniously to be known, has the ingredients to induce lasting sorrow in its remembrance, I mean such things as the two unemployed young male roofers , brothers, come to cheer on a pal, each losing a leg, and with it such vast potential for their future, the little boy coming to kiss his father at the finish line, blasted dead, and the horror of the thought of two young men, seemingly adjusted guys doing their athletic thing, attending to their studies, suddenly acting out a scenario that belongs in films of the insurgents in Iraq, especially puzzling in the case of the younger brother, whose high school classmates have tesitified to his charm, fun, happy go lucky smoking and drinking and popularity at the senior prom.  The manager of my favorite diner in Manhattan with whom I often exchange words on the world's issues thundered at me when I said I felt sorry that the younger brother seemed to have got under the influence of the older, the militantly religious one, "He killed a six year old boy.  Off he goes to prison, that's that."  At least I knew better than to get into dangerous terrritory of opining which I have the tendency to do that if religion is connected in any way with this tragedy it is yet another instance  of the awful, the terrifying power of religion to lead people to irrational angers, lusts, all kinds of psychic mayhem.  So as I brooded on all this I was walking up Broadway on the Upper Wesst Side and in the meridian, block after block, the magnolia trees were in full bloom, and later when I visited relatives in the splendor of suburban New Jersey where once had stood Teddy Rooosevelt's estate, we walked the streets and gazed at a myriad pink and white flowering trees, at the tender budding leaves of trees yellow green in their newness, reflecting the yellow forsythia at every other house.  My hosts pointed out gaping bare spots where once a giant tree had been laid low in last year's hurricane, yet the oncoming verdure was enough to obscure any sense of barrenness.  And I thought again how beautiful spring is, how glorious nature can present itself to us, and how the natural process does not care about the woes of the world, but goes on about its business of being beautiful, and how in the end that is nonetheless in the eye of the beholder, and I beheld and was happy.