Ode to Boston 1987

Let’s bring this poem up to date two-plus decades and see how the immutable can change.

Somewhere on the Boston course The sun is shining dim.

The Green’s’ a fair at Hopkinton; The liniment fills the gym.”

Brown Jr.’ fires the starting gun*

As his father did before.

For this brief hour? the world looks here— Not at politics or war.®

The road ahead holds history From Boston Billy’s four,

To Joanie B’s in *83—

Her own and the world’s PR.*

The crowds are bright along the way: The Wellesley girls’ so fair,

The B.C. kids on Heartbreak Hill, Sox fans* in Kenmore Square.

*This line rhymes if, like me, you grew up in Boston.

‘Actually, runners are now kept in pens near the high school and are forbidden from entering the town (lest they raise the groundwater table with prerace preparations). Ignore those proscriptions and get there early enough to enjoy the townsfolk and their festival.

Yes, 20 years ago the entire starting field and its liniment filled the (old) Hopkinton high school gym. Now not only is the field outside, but the gym is no longer the gym of the new mansionized high school.

Actually, for most of the past 20 years no member of the Walter Brown family has appeared on the starting podium. Race sponsors do, though.

‘Starting gun? Now there are two with the blasphemous “second start” half an hour after the first.

5Well, not the same hour. These years, after a century-old tradition of a noon start, the race start comes earlier in the morning in order to make automobile traffic happier.

°With all the malignant changes, there remain these two constants over two decades.

TYes, they are still there, though better call them Wellesley women in the era of Title IX matured. But no longer do you run the gauntlet of these fair maidens; 21st-century traffic control confines them to the campus side of Route 135.