Sad. That�s about all I can feel this morning reading the news of the London bombings. My city has been scarred again.

London was not the place I lived first, last or longest as a kid, but it is the place I felt most at home, the first place I lived that felt like mine, not a stopping point on an endlessly shifting life. I lived on Regent�s Park in the heart of the city in a building that had once been home to nobility but was later converted to flats for commoners and foreigners like us.

I moved there in the 1970s. Although there were outward expressions of violence, they were mostly circumscribed. Punk music and its incarnations, multiply punctured with safety pins. Football fans with black eyes from post-match melees. There were IRA bombs, but we heard more of damage than death or injury (or perhaps that was more my age, perhaps I was simply unaware). Nevertheless, the city was relatively safe and at age 9, I had the whole city to myself, an unheard of freedom after emerging from my suburban cocoon. I knew every inch of the park across the street because I had discovered it myself. I could cross the whole city on the Tube alone. Still, there were concerns. Our American school had regular bomb drills and occasional bomb-scare days replaced the snow days of my Connecticut elementary school. My grandmother called regularly from her home in Michigan, worried that something might befall us. When IRA squatters took up residence in a vacant flat in our building, we carefully avoided mentioning this fact to her.

Shortly after we returned, there was news of a bombing with much greater damage. The IRA had blown up the bandstand where we used to attend concerts on many summer nights, near the mobile theater where my brother and I used to wander from our flat by way of the playground to see the free puppet shows. Such a bomb could only be intended to hurt as many innocent people as possible. It was chilling. And personal.

This morning as I read the news of the attacks, I read a litany of my childhood: Kings Cross where we went to watch the trains go in and out. Russell Square where my best friend lived. Moorgate. Liverpool Street. Edgeware Road. I know them all. The London of my childhood is gone. AJ is growing up in a world where he will never know a city the way I knew the London that was. He�s growing up in a world where I�m afraid to show him the newspaper. He�s growing up in a world where I�m afraid to read the newspaper myself. To all who have suffered losses in this mornings events, you are in my thoughts.

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