Week 81: Ford MK IV

Four weeks have passed since the shootings at Chardon High School.

I live with my family in Geauga County in neighboring Chesterland, near Chardon, and while I did not know the victims or their families, my connections were closer than I might have thought, as I have seen the ripples from this tragedy move through my family.

My youngest children are enamored by superheros, so when they recently began mentioning bad guy "killing them," or "getting them dead" I gently guided them to better methods of play but didn't see anything as tremendously unusual. While my five year, old laying on the carpet, arms outstretched after being pretend shot, seemed uncharacteristically morbid, they were playing Hulk and Captain America, so, while disturbing, I didn't look deeply but continued to suggest less death-related pretend.

In preparing Baby G for pre-school next year I met with Racer A's current teacher, and in conversation she mentioned how pretend versions of death and being shot had permeated much of her class since the shootings. The older brother of one of A's classmates had been seated at the cafeteria table in Chardon near the fatal shootings. His preschooler brother, through overhead bits of conversation and a preschooler's perception of the world, had developed the vaguest awareness of the events, but they had powerfully filtered into his psyche, and, through classroom play, into the collective childhood psyche of the class.

The pretend play of the students did not involve school shootings, of course, but were framed in their own pretend language of superheros and policemen. The altered context of the play appears to be a subtle way the students were coping with dark ideas and concepts to which which they had been introduced but of which they were only barely aware. The events of that day behaved like a cold, grey liquid not so much poured but rather misted over all of us in this community, its dampening darkness finding its way into every thought and action, even those of the very young.

For my oldest son, who recently turned 12, his increased fearfulness of losing loved ones or in possibly confronting some unforeseen tragedy were not a surprise to me. My wake up moment came from a comment he made expressing a sad acceptance that "these things happen all the time." In a startling revelation, I grasped how built into the collective mind of his generation was the threat of school shootings.

Born in 2000 and having grown up hearing about numerous school shootings and their media analysis, my son lives in a time when mandatory terror drills are now conducted at schools. In a type of cold chill moment, I realized my son saw school shootings like tornadoes, cancer, and car accidents. He was saddened and he was shaken, but he was not surprised, at least not in the same incredulous way that myself and other adults were. To him, these things were part of the cultural landscape, and while you prey they don't happen to you, you realized they do happen.

I pointed out that these things don't happen all the time, and for every school tragedy of which he hears there are hundreds, thousands of schools that will never see such things, but my words sounded hollow. Our little rural suburban area had experienced an event beyond my comprehension, and I can never return him to a time before such violence was common knowledge. That time of childhood is irretrievable.

These events have made me more compassionate about children who grow up in war or in urban areas where gang violence and crime are prevalent. Such violence once seemed so removed, and I had once accepted such violence "out there" as a bitter inevitability in the same way my son now sees school shootings, accept for him there is no out there. To him, all students live out there.

As I drove home last week after picking up my five-year-old from his preschool bus drop-off (I drive 20 minutes to the Head Start bus stop, and his bus then drives an additional 12 minutes to his school) he asked if I wanted to play a game his friend had invented. To win, you had to find all the red ribbons. Confused at first, I realized he was looking for the hundreds of ribbons tied on trees, telephone poles and mailboxes in Claridon, an area just south of Chardon, as a show of solidarity for the community and remembrance for the victims.

Maybe I should have explained the significance of the ribbons -- I don't know, but I didn't. Instead, I played.

"There's another one, over there," I said, trying to not sound like I felt. "There's another one, on that sign post."


Note: This week's picture, a Ford MK IV, is one of my earliest tiny cars, one that has miraculously survived since I originally received it as a Christmas gift in 1969 or 1970 as part of a Hot Wheels track set. Broken yet full of spirit, this little car from a childhood long, long gone seemed somehow fitting for this week's blog, one that I wasn't sure I could write. Thanks to  Phil Pekarcik for the picture.


More than words can express, I wish for healing for the families and friends of the victims.  I also wish for healing beyond my little area of Ohio for all of the areas of the world where violence touches and stains the lives of children.