Three Events

Jim's service is this weekend. He has been on my mind for weeks now. Heavy. Tiring. A deep sadness that hangs around the moments of my busy life.

Then yesterday. A man walks into a local restaurant and kills one person seriously wounds another. We've had a lot of shootings in the neighborhood lately. So many that, at school, we're in perpetual yellow alert -- parents must come into the school to pick up their kids and we can no longer go to the park for recess. The kids are crazed. So are we.

And then long talks about what the shootings mean to our community. Some are gang related, but yesterday's shooting was not, though the news would tell us otherwise. It was a young man, angry at the man who was dating his girlfriend. Domestic violence, they're saying, but it's so much deeper than that.

A student in my classroom lived with this man when he was a boy. He was a foster child in their home and she watched him like she'd watch an older brother. And then he went to prison. At 16 where he's been for the past 7 years. Not just prison, but solitary confinement.

"He has anger issues," said the mother of the girl in my classroom, the mother who knew this young man. She wept as she told me how sad she was that this is how his life ended up. "What was he supposed to do? I'm not condoning what he did, but he was a kid who couldn't get a job, couldn't find a place to live, and was very, very angry."

I listened. I cried, too. It's so much more complicated than a young man killing another young man over a girl.

In the morning, another parent told of us her oldest daughter's current condition. The youngest daughter is in our class so the mother wanted us to know that "G had turned for the worst." G had suffered a brain injury in a horse riding accident. For over a year she's been in a coma and now today, she was diagnosed with an abscess on her brain. G was coming home with a hospice nurse. W, the girl/sister in our class, has never once talked about her sister. She's never once let on how horrible it must be to have a sister in a coma, a sister she's watched diminish and slowly die for over a year.

And then this afternoon. W's father came and asked to check W out of school. "A medical emergency." W raced out of the room.

Three events. So unique, so different, and yet so much the same.

I walked home today in the rain. It was cold and windy and wet. When I got home I leashed up Rubin and we went out in the weather again. I was hoping it would wash me somehow, make me feel as if the world in which I lived was good and clean.

It is, of course, both good and clean. But it is also evil and dirty. It's also unjust and unfair.

I am thankful for the rain. I am thankful for the cold. I am thankful for the wind.

And, despite the pain, I am thankful I knew Jim, that I know the foster mother of a troubled young man, and that I know a young girl who is facing the world the only way she knows how -- one moment at a time.