If I had had my act together this week, I would have written something coherent about the five-year anniversary of Columbine today. I reminded my wife at 12:30 this afternoon that five years ago right then very frantic news reports were coming off the TV and news helicopters were swarming overhead. Eight or ten of them were circling the area all day long. She still doesn’t like the sound when they fly near our house.

She had called me on my new cell phone–our first, bought because the baby was coming soon–to tell me that I might not want to come back from lunch by way of Bowles Avenue. I had heard all about it while I was getting my hair cut 45 minutes earlier: there was a bomb scare or some nut had a gun or something at Columbine, and the traffic would probably be bad. Twenty-five minutes before that, at 11:20am on April 20, 1999, I was at my insurance agent’s office, a couple of blocks away from the high school. Shots were probably being fired as I drove past the intersection of Quincy and Bowles, where a right turn leads you to the front door of national headlines.

It may sound odd to people who don’t live here, but Columbine compares well to September 11 in terms of its impact on this community. People were changed here, myself included. People were in a funk. Shocked, raw, uncertain what do to or how to react. Angry, even. I know I was angry. Angry, for some totally irrational reason, that I wasn’t there, and couldn’t have shot those two dead before they took those thirteen lives in the most Satanic outworking of adolescent angst ever imagined in Littleton. Like it was my fault. Don’t ask me.

I remember resenting the media in the week that followed. This wasn’t really their loss, but still they felt content to tear up the grass at Clement Park with their satellite uplinks and mobile production studios. Good Morning America was broadcast from the same park in which my son now takes skateboard lessons. Katie Couric does not belong in Clement Park. Her all-American cuteness and politically unbiased reporting belongs in Studio A in New York City, not in a field I can see from my back door when the trees drop their leaves. And most years, trees don’t really get their leaves until early May.

If you read this blog, you might guess that I am not the type to get all affected when bad things happen in distant places. When domestic terrorists kill scores of people by blowing up Federal buildings, or killer tornadoes rip up small towns in Oklahoma–remember, these are what passed for national tragedies in April of 1999–I don’t tend to come apart at the seams. Columbine, however, is anything but a distant place. I brooded; I played loud, cathartic music; I actually grieved. I am not an emotional man, so I was surprised when I discovered that Columbine had happened to me.

Nine days later Sarah was born. By baby number three, Nine Months Pregnant is not as scary as the first time around, but childbirth still has a way of refocusing a guy’s attention on the immediate. Over the next two or three months, as we recovered from the insanity of having a newborn, Columbine eventually receded in a literally gray and rainy past. Work, worship, raise the kids…we got over it.

Sarah turns five in a week. Plates, cups, and party favors have a Hello Kitty theme, by her choice. Columbine was a long time and a different country ago, but news helicopters still do it to me whenever they circle the neighborhood.

• 
• Posted by Tim on Tuesday, April 20, 2004 at 11:05:41 pm PDT
• Category: Miscellany
• Comment RSS Feed