small town

The town is wavering. The streets were almost empty this morning with the university closed and the public school closed. The parking lots were filled with media vans, and last night all the news big heads were walking around campus. The university is large, but this is a small town. It is somewhat geographically isolated, and before yesterday I might have joked that the worst thing that could have happend to a student here was a bad hangover, a burn from a tanning bed, or maybe a girl was weighed down by the weight of her own sparkling lip gloss. Today, I see these people as fragile, breakable, terrified children.

We heard about a shooter from another mother on a cell phone. A friend and I were talking in the parking lot of the coffee shop and the mother on the phone said, "Get in your car; someone is shooting people on campus." We raced to Ella's school which was already locked down and spent the next few hours there. The children watched a movie in the library with no windows and the teachers found them a snack. No one seemed to notice that school wasn't ending. At this point we were incredulous that one or perhaps even two people had been killed. I would have never expected thirty two. We were maybe a mile away. We were very worried about our friends who were there, and it was hard to get through on the telephone for the rest of the day. I was happy to be near the children and know that they were safe. Their teacher was doing a nice job balancing her own concerns with the twenty four little people locked behind several doors.

When we could go I got out of town as quickly as possible. At the grocery store the power was out because of the high winds, but we shopped in the dim light. The checker had the radio blaring and I asked her to turn it down so that the children wouldn't hear. She wouldn't so I blabbed loudly about nothing for five minutes. If you want to talk about the root of the problem I'd say that people are insensitive to the violence that they expose children to, but I'm going to save that for another day.

At home I made lunch before letting Ella watch TV so that I could come downstairs and check the news on the computer.

Today Ella had school. She still doesn't know about the killings, but some of the children do know. I don't want her thinking that things like that happen at "daddy's school". Many of the children have older siblings and I expect it is impossible to keep that information from spreading. Many people live here because it seems to be such a safe, child friendly environment, and this incident has really shattered that.

We went to the park and flew a kite this afternoon. It was so bright and sunny.

I know that devastating incidents like this can happen anywhere. The stories are resonating though these hills tonight.