On Clinton, Patrick and safety

I remember when President Bill Clinton came to Boston's North End. My sister and brother-in-law lived there then, and I hobbled on over from wherever I was living in Boston.

What I was particularly struck by - aside from the obvious Secret Service men trying to "blend" into the crowd - were the men with rifles atop the buildings.

Which brings me around to Gov. Deval Patrick's visit to Amesbury Wednesday evening. There were some menacing-looking guys (who were actually quite nice, when I spoke to a couple of them) hovering around, but I checked the buildings and no men with rifles, that I could see.

I know I'm hyper-vigilant, but I kept scanning the area to see if there were any suspicious-looking characters, aside from the ones I know about in Amesbury who are mostly harmless.

Of course, nothing untoward happened and the Gov. was able to, from what I read today, enjoy dinner at Flatbread Pizza, just across the walkway from where he took questions from the crowd.

I was impressed with the way the Gov. fielded the questions, etc., and his wife is lovely (I had the honor of meeting her last December).

By the way, I would not have estimated the size of the crowd to be as large as did the DN reporter. But I was amused to see this correction in today's paper:

In an article in yesterday's edition on Gov. Deval Patrick's visit to Amesbury ("I'm here to listen to you," Page 1), Newburyport's Ron Klodenski was misquoted. Klodenski told Patrick, "We need you to strong-arm your Department of Environmental Protection," in regard to the Crow Lane landfill.

This is what I meant in my earlier post, about when I was a reporter covering the same events as the Daily - sometimes I wondered if the DN reporter and I had been in the same place! I kind of wondered when they had Ron's quote in there (since I didn't hear Ron say what they said he did), but I thought perhaps he said it during a time I was watching for snipers lurking in the bushes ...

Hyper-vigilance, btw, is what made me stop my sister from stepping out into a crosswalk on Massachusetts Ave. in Boston when the "Walk" sign came on - a car ran the red light and would have knocked her flying, possibly down onto the Central Artery.

Sometimes I like to identify that incident as prescience on my part, but I really think it was more the hyper-vigilance. It's identified as a disorder, did you know?

Clinton, also btw, has the brightest blue eyes I think I had ever seen. They were/are almost startling in their blueness.

There was a Secret Service agent standing next to me, and he sort of chuckled when everyone was exclaiming about the blue eyes (earlier, he had said to me, "This is exciting, huh?" It must have been a ploy of some sort to access if I had any evil intentions. Since he stayed put, maybe he concluded that I did! ... Nah, it's just that we were standing directly opposite Mike's Pastry, Clinton's destination.)