BOSTON -- As the elite women runners took their first strides in Hopkinton, Chris Manjourides was standing over a grill at Charlie’s on Columbus Avenue in the South End, slinging hash.
His brother Arthur was pouring pancake batter on the griddle. Their sister Marie Fuller was filling a mug with coffee and another sister, Fontaine Anzalone, was explaining to a couple of college kids that Charlie’s is tight on space so they would have to share a table with strangers.
Marie Fuller, wearing a blue Boston Strong T-shirt, stepped outside onto a sun-splashed sidewalk. She came back in, surveyed the room she’s worked for nearly half a century, and said: “It’s going to be a good day.” And it was.
The relaxed, uneventful, overwhelming ordinariness inside Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe was replicated all along the Marathon route, where everything that was so wrong about Patriots Day last year was swamped on Monday in a sea of normalcy.
Everything seemed as it ever was, except when it came to the person who ran the fastest 26.2 miles. Meb Keflezighi became the first American man to win the Boston Marathon in 31 years. He came to this country as a 12-year-old refugee from Eritrea, went to UCLA and made something of himself.
A year after a pair of refugees who spurned all the opportunity offered to them by this country attacked the Marathon, a refugee who embraced what they rejected won it.
Last Patriots Day, Dr. Ricky Kue was working the Alpha tent near the finish line when he heard two distinctive booms. Kue, an emergency room physician at Boston Medical Center and a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, found himself in an almost surreal hospital theater, treating in Back Bay the sort of injuries he saw in Iraq years before.
On Monday, Dr. Kue was working the Bravo tent on St. James Avenue. For much of the day he was almost bored, and it was a beautiful thing to behold. He didn’t see lives destroyed. He saw and heard what he always saw and heard before last year.
”A couple of times, I stepped out of the tent and I saw all the runners, all these families, with kids, just walking, relaxed and happy, and it was just like I remembered it,” he said. “It was just so . . . normal.”
This year’s Marathon took place on Easter Monday, a day replete with symbolism. On Easter Monday in 1916, rebels marched in Dublin and took over the General Post Office, launching a rebellion that eventually led to Irish freedom. People died on the main street in Dublin all those years ago, just as they died on the main street of Boston last year.
Poet William Butler Yeats was alternately appalled and awed by what transpired on Easter Monday 98 years ago, leading him to write “Easter 1916,” a meditation on the pain and suffering and death that gave birth to something Yeats called a terrible beauty.
What happened last year on Boylston Street was terrible. And yet what followed was more powerful than a bomb. Police officers, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics and ordinary people ran headlong to help the wounded. Everyone who was stabilized by medical people like Ricky Kue and transported to the hospital was saved. More than one was brought back from the dead.
On Easter Monday, we had our own Easter Rising.
Editorial, Pages 14 on 04/24/2014