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Miss Her Photographs Ola arrived at the office today about an hour late. She'd received a phone message from her daughter's school saying in effect that the school could not guarantee her daughter's safety and that she should make arrangements to get her home, preferably by a route not routinely used. This was not the way Ola had envisioned her day beginning.
She called the school and learned that there had been threats by a "gang"
located at another school in the area to drive by their building and
I know, a copycat prank, but what ugly results. Intellectually you can look at it and say this is the work of idiots, but more probably idiots not looking to shoot real bullets into a school, but idiots looking to create a stir on the cheap and make the papers. They did it with a small bomb and two phone calls. The bomb is worrisome, somebody had to make it and place it and I don't know what kind of person does that, but phone calls are cheap with, at least today in this small suburban town, one hell of an impact. "We can't guarantee your daugher's safety...." That was as strange to me, as surreal and weird to me, in some ways, as the news of the shootings in Colorado. I took one of the pain pills last night and slept pretty well. Not great, I still woke up at 5:00 in the morning, but I didn't awaken in the middle of the night either. Took a bath, shaved, went to work. Took another pain pill in the morning and pretty much worked through the day. Lunch at my desk, a tuna sandwich that I pulled apart one piece at a time and stuffed up under my front teeth without anyone watching. It was OK. I like tuna fish sandwiches and keeping out of sight for a couple of weeks while I eat them at my desk doesn't seem particularly disastrous. Nancy Firedrake evidently hung up her keyboard today "For the time being". I'll miss her journal and I'll miss her photographs. |
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spray it with bullets. There had been a warning by this same "gang" that
a bomb had been planted in the school the day before and a search had
resulted in the discovery of a small bomb on the premises. They were
sending all the students home with this "can't guarantee their safety"
message and recommending that the students use a route not usually
traveled, presumably to throw off any, um, planned ambushes. I don't
have any children, but it doesn't take any imagination to feel how
this must have been received by Ola and the other parents. Someone
wanted to cause trouble, perhaps students at another school, perhaps not,
but the result was spectacular in its cruelty. An entire town, children
and parents, is essentially terrorized for the day and the memory, buried
of not, will essentially live forever.