photo courtesy Richmond Times Dispatch.com
We were all thinking it: Oh please dear God don’t let this be another Columbine. Ok, maybe I was the only paranoid one thinking it. But as I sat at my desk in tears, thankful that my office mate had a long afternoon meeting and I was left with eyes welling up before my tears ran amuck and Henrico’s police scanner rang in my ear, my mind started playing tricks on me.
Glen Allen High School is, quite literally in my backyard.
Now that winter has stripped the trees in our backyard of their green overcoat the school is in plain view for a few months until spring drapes them again, shielding us from the parking lot and brick surface surrounding one of Henrico’s newest schools. Today, the school’s parking lot was filled with SWAT teams and media while feverish parents huddled in our nearby shopping center at Crossridge awaiting police updates on “the situation.”
photo courtesy Examiner.com
After a couple of hours–at least in my case–of watching/listening/praying, a juvenile was taken into custody after Glen Allen High School was locked down. Reports say the student wasn’t at the school, but all the necessary precautions were taken. For that I’m thankful. For the lump that’s still in my throat, well, I’m not sure how to feel about that. Texts flew from our tight-knit neighborhood, everyone concerned, internalizing, frightened, hopeful.
I just finished reading Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed, a story about one family’s unraveling after the wife, a nurse at Columbine, is in the library during the highly-publicized student shootings. What surprised me most was the aftershocks that rock the core of everyone involved in the shootings, far past the expected geographic and emotional parameters.
Finishing the 700+ page book I remembered thinking how lucky I was that nothing to that scale has happened to anyone I know.
Today, I still feel lucky, just a bit more wary, a bit more nervous on broaching this subject with my eleven year-old who walks home from middle school along the path that was lined with police today, and my eight and six-year olds who were in elementary school. They were all also on precautionary lockdown.
It’s just a reality of 2014 I suppose, after many years now of copycat shootings and “distraught” kids with guns in their hands.
And I feel lucky, but terribly, terribly awake, and I think I’ll be like this for a long time.
