The Night before The Day

We all know tomorrow will be the end of the world but for some, it will come too late. Their world has already ended.  I thought I’d blog anyway as I still have time, whatever the reality.

When I landed at Boston Logan airport last Sunday it was dark, windy and pouring with rain – just like home. Home is Derby, England and I made the seven hour flight to visit family in Blackstone, Massachusetts, a quiet, provincial backwater with trees, lakes and big houses with big kitchens. 

8 Laurel

It’s Thursday afternoon. Bright, sunny, cold, and looking through my son’s office window where I am catching up on emails and stuff, there are birds and trees I can’t name. Pine trees are easy; green-needles and straight trunks. Others are leafless and might be birch and elm. The room is comfortable and full of family photographs, books and technology. I have use of the office because Ian, my son, is not yet home from a week in Dublin and Belfast on business.

Grandson Oscar, who will be four in February, is noisily running round being a ‘Power Ranger’ or some cartoon character, screaming like a banshee from time to time as he destroys the ‘enemy’ (in this case his mum), with plastic gun/sword/laser weapons available from all good toy shops.

Grandson Alex is ten and is at elementary (ages 4-11) school a few miles away. He breaks up tomorrow for the holiday.

Like most families we’re preparing for Christmas; hanging lights outside wherever there’s power, baking cakes and biscuits, wrapping presents and doing last minute, on-line shopping. By ‘we’ I mean my daughter-in-law and best friend Katharine, and me.

It sounds idyllic but – there’s always a ‘but’ – we have spent most of our time being eternally grateful we don’t live ‘down the road’ and wishing for Ian’s safe return from Belfast. Telephone conversations from both his hotel and work were punctuated by sirens and noisy crowds causing disruption in various parts of the city. With such a violent recent history, it is not hard to conjure images of indiscriminate bombings and terrorist activity, with innocent victims being part of these supposedly peaceful political demonstrations.

Our nerves jangled a little until we knew this morning that he was on his way home, albeit on a ten hour flight via Philadelphia, arriving Boston Logan around 4.30 p.m. Eastern Seaboard Time (EST), or GMT -5 if you prefer.

That’s if – and there’s often an ‘if’ even without a ‘but’ – that’s if the weather in Philadelphia has not closed the airport. Snow is falling in northern and central areas by the foot and heading our way for tomorrow. Wind, heavy rain and tornadoes are blowing up from the south through the ‘pan handle’, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and so on.

‘Down the road’ is Newtown, Connecticut, a grief-stricken place this Christmas following the massacre of teachers and a class of kindergarten children in an unbelievable act of mindless violence. The gunman is also dead. Tomorrow will be exactly one week since it happened.

The effect has been felt here, 130 miles away, because only a few weeks previously, Alex’s school was approached by two men, one with a hand gun. Lock-down procedures were implemented in all the nearby schools. As police arrived, an armed officer was deployed in every classroom. The door was locked and the children barricaded the door with their desks and chairs. Blinds covered the windows allowing only enough light to see each other. Then they sat quietly on the floor waiting for the all clear.

Lock-down started at 10.00 a.m. and finished at 4.30 p.m. All parents had been notified and asked to keep away from the school until told of the all clear. As an exercise in safety and logistics it ran like clockwork. No panic, no-one was injured and the men were apprehended.

It barely had a mention on the local, evening news.

Since the Newark tragedy, Alex and many other children in many elementary schools across Connecticut, north Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts, has been on the Yellow school bus each day accompanied by an armed guard.

Armed police patrol the school and supervise all outdoor activities; another guard accompanies the bus home. Children speak wisely and philosophically about the situation despite their lack of years. They are not afraid to go to school, they know ‘the shooter’ is dead and he can’t hurt them again. It’s fine.

While the children might not fully comprehend the intense police activity after the event, now the crime has been committed and the criminal is out of reach, those of us older and wiser know there are sick minded jokers, hoaxers and copy-cat activists who post regularly on social media. They are the danger and their kudos often comes through the media, the desire for fame and notoriety.

The press frenzy has been sickening, nationally, internationally and even the local, media zombies have been trying to pick up scraps and morsels from distant relatives, shopkeepers and any source prepared to say they knew someone caught up in this extraordinary event. Maybe once the last innocent child has been laid to rest, the vultures will leave Newtown and let some sort of healing process begin.

Each day we are reminded how lucky we are not to have been in that small provincial town less than a week ago. We are acutely aware that, rather than thinking, ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen round here, not in this small, provincial town’, we know it could just as easily have happened here and our world could have ended a week early. I fully expect to be here in January, along with my family, by which time the media circus might have found a cause more deserving of their drivel and scribble, and the school bus will no longer be under armed guard.

As the garden slopes away, the lake – it’s too big for a pond – reflects the branches like a mirror, un-rippled by even a hint of a breeze. Here and there, moss-covered rocks rise above the water, or a tussocked mound, an islet, supports a single tree; thin-trunked and spindly.

On the other side, the land rises, a slope covered in scrub, bracken and shrubby growth in various shades of brown until it meets a new line of forest on someone else’s land.

The sun will set soon casting an orange glow over those tree tops – the last sunset?

See you on the other side,

         regards

                Carole - writing from 8 Laurel

View along the drive from front porch steps - August 2012