The Boston Marathon bombings hit a little too close to home for Ladysmith’s Pat Montgomery.
Her son Dennis, lured to the Massachusetts city by a computer-programming job 13 years ago, lives there with his family. The April 15 blasts were within blocks of her daughter-in-law’s law office. Dennis could hear the police helicopters flying by during the subsequent lockdown and manhunt.
Pat herself is familiar with the city. A quilter, she travels there frequently enough that she is on the mailing list of a Boston quilt shop.
It was from the shop’s newsletter that she learned of a Lower Mainland woman’s response to the attack. Within hours of the blasts, and gutted by the news that the dead included an eight-year-old child, Berene Campbell of the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild had come up with the idea of recruiting fellow quilters to fashion squares conveying messages of hope and support. Campbell envisioned sending the squares to Boston, where they would be strung together like Tibetan prayer flags.
Montgomery, a fifth-generation Victorian and former teacher, thought the To Boston With Love project, as it was known, was terrific.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this,’ ” she said Wednesday. “Mother’s Day afternoon, I was quilting two little squares, six inches by eight.”
One square showed three hearts joined to form a shamrock. The other featured a sailboat, as Dennis had grown up sailing in the Gulf Islands; her vessel included a heart on the main sail, a maple leaf on the jib and a letter ‘M’ on the bow, standing for Dennis’s daughter Margaret and the family’s boat, the Merriweather.
Several other Vancouver Island quilters mirrored Montgomery’s efforts. In fact, Campbell’s campaign went viral, the contributors representing every continent except Antarctica.
“They got 1,756 flags from all over the world,” Montgomery said.
Campbell travelled to Boston in time for this past Memorial Day weekend, when the squares were displayed after being tied together and draped through the courtyard of the Museum of Fine Arts. (Dennis phoned her to express his gratitude.)
“I think it provides wonderful consolation,” the museum’s director, Malcolm Rogers, was quoted as saying. “You’ve just seen the worst that human hands and minds can do. And you can come to the museum and see the very best of what human hands and minds can do. It’s inspiring.”
“This shows the inherent goodness of people,” said Holly Broadland, a former Vancouver Islander who founded the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild.
It brought to mind a Mr. Rogers quote that went flying around the Twitterverse in the days after the bombings: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ ”
Some found that a simplistic, saccharine response, the idea that the good of the many can overwhelm the evil of a few. Others muttered about selective compassion; were we as deeply moved — or did we even notice — when more than 100 people were killed in a series of Iraqi car bombings this week?
Still, the lesson remains. When shaken by the kind of horror seen in Boston, people can react by shrinking in fear or lashing out, or by going the other way, striving even harder to open their hearts and do the right thing.
The quilters did the right thing. So did many others. (Note that the Boston Herald reported Tuesday that customers who fled restaurants in the chaos after the bombing have been voluntarily sending money to cover their unpaid bills. The Rattlesnake Bar and Grill alone got $1,200 as patrons from as far away as Florida and Colorado settled their tabs. Good for them.)
The Memorial Day weekend saw 29,391 visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, where To Boston With Love will remain on display until July 7. The museum hopes to show the flags again next year on the anniversary of the tragedy.
