Time Can Heal Those Who Will Let It

I was 20 years old when Jo dumped me. A blind person could have seen it coming. She had been dropping clues for weeks, like a trail of bread crumbs meant to lead me to reality.

Only, I chose not to see.

Which is how I wound up standing at her front door that day. I had come unannounced, and she faced me with a look both sheepish and exasperated. She was wearing the robe I had bought her for Christmas and behind her, in the room she wouldn’t let me enter, I could see some guy I didn’t know sitting on the couch.

Oh. Now I get it.

I had never felt so crushed, so humiliated. I wanted to crawl into a sewer and pull it shut behind me.

I wanted to die.

Last week, some gerbil-brained punk finally heard what my oldest daughter had been telling him for months: that she doesn’t want to be his girlfriend.

He wanted to kill.

Call it a sign of the times - and of the boy’s brazen stupidity. After all, he made the threat loudly, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen. Called my house maybe a half-dozen times to launch obscenity-laced tirades.

Nothing we can do about it, said the police officer who initially responded to our call. Nothing we can do until he follows through on the threat. Besides, he’s a juvenile.

Nothing I can do about it, said his mother when we complained to her. I’ve prayed for him, she said, taken him for counseling. Nothing seems to work. He’s out of control.

I’ll show him control, I thought, indulging myself with violent fantasies that always ended with me standing over his bloodied and unmoving carcass.

And I thought about that day when Jo dumped me. How long ago it seemed. And how innocent I was.

I don’t remember much of what happened after I staggered away from her, my heart shredded. But I know that I healed - and relatively quickly, at that. The memory eventually lost the power to hurt me. Time robbed it of passion, hindsight drew away the heat. It came to seem a minor thing, a speed bump on the road to adulthood.

But for too many kids these days, the bump is a mountain they can’t get over. I don’t pretend to know why. Only that the world seems radically different now. That the children of the day seem ferociously impatient when their desires are denied. That they imbue every tiny setback with the full weight and passion of Shakespearean tragedy. And so, every glancing wound becomes mortal, every real or imagined insult worth killing or dying for.

Does a rosy tint steal across my glasses? Maybe. But I know, have seen, have read of, too many kids for whom it would be inconceivable to merely stumble away, disheveled, from Jo’s door. Too many kids in whom some misplaced sense of honor demands blood and vengeance.

Too many kids who haven’t the time for healing.

And so, you get these awful, screaming headlines about adolescents, babies, shooting, stabbing, beating one another to death. Killing and dying over a boyfriend or a girlfriend, a patch of street or a strip of park. Or, sometimes, just because.

And if I write only about children here, it’s not because I’m unaware that adults also kill and die for foolish, misplaced passions.

No, it’s because they are children and as such, I expect them to be … I don’t know … better. I want them to learn the value of time and perspective so they can know that not all pain kills. Or is worth killing for.

These words go into the computer on a blustery afternoon when the wind whips the trees and the quiet is broken only by the occasional sound of debris hitting the front door. The world is a gray and ugly place and my kids are out there in it. My oldest son is on the road to Gainesville, Fla.; the two middle boys, 12 and 9, are still in school.

And my daughter sits in class under threat of death for having spurned some boy. I watch the door and wait with unaccustomed anxiety for them all to be home.

xxxx