When I was a child growing up in Silver Lake I remember
three distinct times that I was really afraid. Comparing those three times to the horror and fears that the
students and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School have experienced cannot
equate.
I like to think that my five-year-old grandson’s fears
consist only of me singing “Merry Christmas, Darling.”
I had never seen a dead body, nor had I even attended a
funeral. My three fears were of a
grasshopper in the back yard, the fact that my father—being much older than my
mother—would die, and, thirdly, feeling terror at watching the scene in Ben Hur
with the lepers. Each of these
situations was dealt with by different means. With the grasshopper, my dad carried me outside to try to
show me that the insect was of no harm.
With my father’s age, I came up with a ploy that calculated his age and
mine and that by the time he was in his 70’s I would be in my twenties and able
to deal with things like death. I
was 8 at the time and 20 seemed a long way off. And with the leper scene, I crawled into bed with my little
sister.
I cannot image how the children and witnesses of the Sandy
Hook killings will deal with what they’ve experienced.
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