One Thursday morning not long ago, I got slapped with a cruel fact.
Eighteen people had been shot to death in Lewiston, a town 20 miles from my door. And the shooter, already identified, was a resident of Bowdoin, the town that adjoined my town on the way Lewiston.
School closings in my town. Also, shelter-in-place orders for my favorite market … and beer store. I sheltered in place for two days, and did a lot of thinking on things. Just random things.
I thought about how “from away” were the shootings in El Paso, Parkland, Pittsburgh, Charleston, Sandy Hook and Uvalde. “From away,” until that Thursday morning.
I was good. I sheltered in place because I’m retired. The only difference from one day to the next is Sunday, the day the fat paper comes.
But thoughts are renegades; there’s no logic to them. Instead, so my memory tells me, I spent the two days answering phone calls. Calls from Texas, Colorado, St. Paul. Calls from Hawaii, Doha, Florida.
Some callers knew exactly where I was, and how close to the scene. Some knew that Maine is small, so everything is close. Without exception, the calls had deep concern for me and my family. They wanted to know how I was, whether I had fear of the shooter.
To be frank, I hadn’t talked with these people since I left the position where they worked and lived. In short, they universalized the tragedy. I came to realize that shootings anywhere are shootings right here, right now. In the past, I had viewed them as other people’s problems.
I was deeply appreciative of the way that they had both shrunk and expanded my world.
It took me back to the day in Ignacio, Colorado.
Ignacio had always had my respect because the town was one third Mountain Utes, one third Hispanics and one third Anglos, and the school department had the same ratios. I was there doing a day-long workshop on the very day of the Columbine High School shootings – the beginning of an era.
We worked on my stuff 45 minutes per hour, then huddled around TVs for the last 15 minutes.
Everybody in Colorado had a connection to Littleton, where the school was.
“My sister-in-law is from there,” “My cousin worked there,” “I interviewed for a job there,” “A girl I dated dumped me for a guy there,” and so on. I had untold faith in their trust of my mission that day, though I really don’t know how much of my message stuck.
Their lesson to me, however, didn’t stick until the aforementioned Thursday.
That’s when my world expanded and contracted. The death and wantonness expanded my world such that I will never take it for granted that there is no such thing as “from away.” I’ll never again treat victims or their families as someone else’s problem. I even have feelings for the shooters and what tortured thinking brought them to that point.
The phone calls that followed made my world contract.
And so this season is upon us, a time for joy and peace and unity. And the next time another shooting occurs, which won’t be long, I’ll look for unity. I’ll pick up the phone in the name of a small world.
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