I live in a town, a village really, where baby sitters pause on their way to the park, to let toddlers smell the fifty-year old lilac bushes. Where the police waive to dog walkers and Kool-Aid stand signs flicker from their telephone-poll posts, exhausted from a weekend of sales.
There was a murder in my town this week. Ironically, on the front porch of an old farm-style Victorian; the perfect juxtaposition of old and new-serenity and violence. I guess, no one knows exactly what happened. Some say drugs, or maybe a child-custody battle. Others just shake their heads mostly glad they didn’t know any of the people involved. Finding comfort in that fact. If I don’t know them, they must not be my kind of people, therefore, I am safe.
I feel differently. It’s the very fact that I don’t know them that frightens me. The fact that “the evil they” “shooter-kind-of-people” are out there, close by, deciding not to shoot me or mine. I can handle random but making a choice, that’s harder some how.
My daughter walks past the house every day, on her way to school. They had a gun. They could have shot her. Or me and my dog. The house is on a hill I like to walk for the cardiovascular benefits. The ache in my thighs. Feel the burn.
I wonder how the two things can exist in one time period, one street in the world. My world. Caregivers gentle enough to let a toddler smell the flowers and someone desperate enough, angry enough, to shoot to kill. Once again, I am schooled in control as in: there is so very little. Once again I am reminded to say to the girls when they leave for school, Make Good choices and if you stop to smell the flowers, keep your freak’n head down. Buddha I am not.
Tags: Buddha, control, Small town usa, toddler
