As I sit here hopping from one newsfeed to the next trying to stay on top of the latest local tragedies, I wonder what actually brings someone to the point where they feel it’s a great idea to take another person’s life.
My usually peaceful yet brake-light filled trip home ended with marked and unmarked police cars lining the side of my street. Onlookers stood around with hands in pockets trying to make sense of all the commotion. I wondered too.
A neighbor (or at least I hope she was) informed me there was a triple shooting and at least one person was dead. I was floored.
Now, I don’t want to lead on that I live in Mayberry, but damn! This is way too close for comfort. The details about the event are still sketchy. All I know is it didn’t appear to be related to a home invasion – per the police.
What would it take to get me to the point of taking someone’s life? I’m sure if a person hurt my children (dogs included) I could easily slip into a special place in my head where I’d want to cause extreme harm. Maybe that’s what happened last night. Who knows?
I feel violence may be justified if it’s in the act of protecting or defending one’s kids. But, violence should never come from two adults disagreeing on a certain subject; yet that seems to be the underlying problem in most cases.
Instead of tougher gun laws, we could all benefit from classes to teach us how to be more effective communicators. Or at a minimum, send us to the same school the people from DMV must attend. The one where they’re obviously taught not to give a damn about anything other than smoke breaks.
If a person feels they need to pull a gun to express their point, they should at least do it honorably. Back to back and walk 10 paces, and out in the woods where no one else can be harmed by their senseless behavior.
Just in case I can’t figure out which school my DMV heroes attended, I’m going to look up my local laws on gun ownership. I think I hear the theme to The Sopranos playing in the background.
During a recent family get together up north, my brother jokingly admitted (over a few beers) we should write a script to capture the crazy, funny and sometimes sad times of our child hood.
Although that thought has always been in the back of my mind, I never knew what to write about or where to start. But, like anything else, I guess the best place to start is in the beginning.
One of my earliest memories has me kneeling on a sofa and peering out the window looking onto the porch and towards the old arcade and corner store directly across the street. I remembered it getting dark and being alone for a long time. I remembered taking hot, sweaty naps on a thick, green shag carpet.
I drank juice from a glass bottle that was on the lower level in the refrigerator and fed myself with pieces of cheese I was able to break free from a huge block.
For the longest time after that I thought maybe they’re not my memories. I figured it was possibly a scene from a movie I watched as a kid and it got stuck in my head.
No such luck. Twenty-five or so years later, I moved back home to rebuild my life after a failed marriage or 2. I sat around the table with my grandmother, feeling sorry for myself and trying to make sense of why I was there. I’ll save her response to that for another time.
She started to tell me the story of how she came looking for me when I was a kid. At that time, I lived a block away from my grandparents on the same street. My grandmother had not seen me in a few days and wanted to check on her only grandchild.
She walked down the street and onto the porch of my white and green house and found her 4 year old grandson staring back at her through the front window.
She let herself inside with a spare key and looked around for my mom, who was nowhere to be found.
She noticed I wasn’t able to get off the couch and I had a high fever. She surveyed the tiny house and noted an empty Riunite wine bottle in the fridge and a pack of old cheese that I was apparently gorging on.
I was scooped up in my Underroos and driven immediately to the hospital emergency room to get checked out. Once we were able to be seen, the doctor looked at me and asked my grandmother if I was retarded. She informed him she thought I may be drunk, which I was.
It’s funny how times have changed. If I took a drunk 4 year old to the emergency room today, I would be arrested and charged with everything from tax evasion to putting out a bad health care plan.
However, some things haven’t changed too much. Apparently that night I was taken back home and allowed to sleep off the wine. I’ve been reliving that same scenario as an adult. Substitute the wine for whatever’s on tap.
I was told my mom moved to California during that time and left me behind to be the man of the house, alone. And to think, all that time I thought she was at work.
This isn’t a sad childhood story. There were a lot of valuable lessons learned during that three day period.
I was able to provide for myself. I learned sleeping on shag carpets is not something I’d recommend and lastly, whenever times get tough alcohol is always my friend.
