Around midnight last night I checked my email one last time before heading to bed and found a series of emails that had been sent between my sisters and mom, initiated by my middle sister sharing this The Atlantic article. It is about how Boston is the adopted home of so many because of the concentration of colleges and universities in the Boston metro area. My mom's rather touching response thanked my sisters and me for picking schools in Boston, starting a thirteen year love affair between the Cohen family from Indianapolis and an East coast city with Puritan roots.
I've obviously been thinking a lot about Boston over the past 48 hours. These family emails got me thinking how so many small decisions set off three Cohen family girls going to college in the same city and how, when my youngest sister graduates next month, we'll have completed a path that none of us could have predicted when I mailed my deposit to Tufts University on April 30, 2000.
Let me start by fully admitting that my 17 year old logic was greatly influenced by Ben Affleck, who told me I owed it to him to cash in my chips and go to Boston. (warning: R-rated movie clip). The idea in 'Good Will Hunting' not being that every person needs to go across the country to go to college (and certainly not being that it is the right move for every person to leave their friends and family without saying goodbye to make some kind highly successful life for themselves). Instead, the spirit of that movie, and the spirit of what Boston meant to me, was that it represented taking a risk. I would be heading to college alone, without knowing another person on campus. I would be headed to the airport if I wanted to go home, so there would be no Sunday trips for a free washer and dryer or a home cooked meal. I would be living in a city, but for the first time in my life not getting around by car.
So, thirteen years ago, I made a choice. I sent in a deposit and decided I'd be spending the next four years in a city called Boston. I'd be living in the magical place I'd seen in the movie, but now it would be real. There, I would learn about rally caps, and rotarys, and how to pronounce "Worcester." I would learn that Harvard wasn't in Boston, it was in Cambridge. I would learn that it wasn't coffee if it wasn't from Dunkin Donuts. I would know what the Atlantic Ocean smelled like. I would learn that the trick to the North End was to sit and eat at Caffe Vittoria instead of standing in the line at Mike's Pastry. I would Cowboy Up. I would sit in traffic as the largest and most expensive public works project put stretches of highway underground. I would open my first checking account at Fleet Bank. I would volunteer at the finish line at the Boston Marathon.
And thus, here we are. A nation watching yet another senseless violent act. I'd never heard of Patriot's Day until I got to Boston, but the day will certainly hold new meaning next year, and for years to come, as we will now be reminded of a new kind of patriot.
This month, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors are in the same place I was 13 years ago. My advice to you, my mom's advice to you, is to choose your Boston. Choose the place where you are taking a risk but where you can see your potential. Choose the place that has a spirit and a heartbeat and an energy that you'll take with you four years from now when you finish college and take your next step into a job or graduate school. Choose a new home that makes you a little bit excited and a little bit scared. Boston was very good to me; I hope your Boston will be good to you too.
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