Boston Symphony

April 16, 2018

Greetings from the conductor,

It begins quietly, with the sound of these laces being tied.

For many months now, the sound has been subtle, an introduction to the main piece.  Just my feet, some days lightly tapping the pavement, other days chuffing and scraping.  My breath has evolved to keep up, adding gasps and wheezes and puffs that sound like someone moaning. 

There are other sounds that I don’t make but I am a part of.  The rustle of my knit hat over my ears.  The wind raking over the snow covered fields, the hissing sound of freezing rain, the clack of branches.  I let that accumulate in my subconscious for the last few months.  Sounds that slowly formed into a composition of sorts. 

Some days I have felt like the instrument.  There is a string that has been tuned in me, tightened to just the right tension, and now strummed gives off a vibration that sounds almost right.  The music may not be perfect or entirely beautiful, but it feels like it’s becoming my expression.

And some days I am just part of the music, mixed in with the melodies created around me to make something bigger, more meaningful.  A performance not just for my own enjoyment but to make a sound to change the space around me. 

This weekend the sounds changed, and the volume is tweaked.  Boston is friendly, but it is still a big city and it has a sound, and the people here are proud of that.  But this weekend the sound is us.  Us is the marathoners.  It is the languages from all over the world and accents from every corner of every corner, telling each other we will triumph.

We make the T louder.  We make the coffee shops hum and bang and add the melody of laughter and excitement.  We push echoes between the buildings, into the faces of churches and brownstones and statutes. 

We are in the shops eating and talking and laughing, crowding into elevators, clustered at corners, and all this is just noise until we are out in the street.  And then we change the sound of the street.

In the Sunday morning shakeout runs down Boyleston to that place we have dreaded and dreamed of, we become part of the choir of voices that have rushed toward this place for 122 years.  The sound of us running as we get ready to run.  The energy that comes with it has its own harmony. 

We make the rain change its trajectory toward the pavement.  We bang the puddles and breathe into the place between the wet.  We split the wind like reeds, making it whistle our song.

The rain is our applause.  It is popping on the pavement and on our backs and in the hands of the people applauding and that is the percussion of this morning’s run from Hopkinton to Boston.

It is today’s score and we are literally soaking it in.

Every race, really every day, holds this music.  We decide if or how much we add to it, or if we hear it.  This morning a crowd of performers will line up next to me and look down the long line between the first notes and the last and will bravely compose our finest work.  The instruments we bring are the bodies we have tuned, the spirit we have nurtured, the steel we have forged.

This is the Boston Symphony.  The songs of tens of thousands of runners and the people who came here to witness their song.  It is a performance born out of passion and pain and courage and just putting one more mark on the score to make it what we can.   

I am filling my lungs to sing in it.  I am summoning the strength I put in these muscles to make each step mark the time, set the cadence, to be among the cascade of sound that rings out from start to finish and into the days to come.  I am part of the music and it is part of me.  We are all Boston Strong because of the sound that resonates among us.

First, we lace up and go. 

Hope this finds you singing along,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith