One Good Reason

PROLOGUE

Let's get something straight right off the bat — it's not called "Beantown" or "The Bean" or "The Town." (I'm looking at you, Ben Affleck.) It's sure as shit not called "The Hub" or the "City on the Hill." I don't know where those ass-backwards nicknames came from and, frankly, I don't want to know.

It's called Boston.

Sure, locals will pronounce this moniker with varying degrees of emphasis on the first vowel. (If you're from Southie, it's "Bah-ston," while if you're from the North Shore, it's a very proper, clearly annunciated "Bos-ton," which you say with one-pinky in the air as you sip your seven-dollar chai tea latte and wax poetic about that one time you saw Blue Man Group on your seventeenth birthday in the big bad city.) Accents aside, if you call my hometown anything else, these same locals will look at you with well-practiced New Englander scorn.

What can I say? We aren't the warmest bunch.

The second thing you should know — ninety percent of the people who claim they're from Boston actually aren't. They, in fact, live in affluent little suburbs with a median household income of a cool million, attend prosperous private schools, and grow up to be doctors and lawyers, just as their parents intended. (I see you, Newton.) If you're really from the city — and I mean born and bred with the Charles on your left and the Atlantic on your right — you're probably more like me.

A little rough around the edges. Quick to call bullshit when you see it. Borderline addicted to Dunkin Donuts coffee. And pretty fucking tired of people hating on Tom Brady just because he happens to be the best quarterback in the history of football.

You know that "Boston Strong" is more than a sticker on the back of a soccer mom's SUV — it's a 200-yard stretch of Boylston Street where terror filled the air one April afternoon. You understand that the Red Sox are, and always will be, better than the Yankees, no matter our batting averages. You realize there's a certain amount of pride that comes in shoveling your car out of a six-foot mound of snow only to have the plows cover it over again ten minutes later. And you're downright certain that no other place in the world will ever hold a candle to the beauty of our skyline when the sun streaks pink over the water.

This is my city.

I've lived here. I've grown here. I've bled and sweat and wept here.

I've walked its every winding, nonsensical avenue, from the sloping streets of Beacon Hill to the aromatic alleys of the North End. I've pushed past tourists crowding Quincy Market and weaved through shoppers on Newbury street. I've run the paths along the murky Charles River at sunset and stumbled home from the neon-lit bars outside Fenway Park at sunrise.

This city isn't just my home.

It's the heart beating in my chest. The blood thrumming through my veins.

I am Boston. Boston is me.

And, so help me god, I'm going to take it back from those who'd seek to poison it.

That's not a promise — it's a vow.