J'Espere

      Sometimes things come too close to home. Almost a week ago in Chapel Hill three young people were shot and killed at a condominium complex. They were killed by a man who had a dispute with them over a parking space. Some say it was a racial killing, since they were Muslim. I’m focusing on parking right now and moving to hate crime later because 1. We are not positive of the facts, since it is an on-going investigation and 2. The parking thing at this particular complex is no joke. I know because I lived it.             For several months during my senior year of college and after I graduated, until I moved to New York, I lived with a friend who had a place in the complex. It was lovely. Nice two and three bedroom condos with bathrooms for each. Perfect for college students and young professionals, which is what most of the neighborhood was made of. But the parking situation there was ridiculous. Really, shoul...

            This year was the most normal I have ever felt on 9/11. I cried on the way to work, but didn’t really think about it once I was teaching, and honestly, not a single one of my students asked about it.   I handled storytime and activities, a research project, finding band aids for small cuts and bruises normally and soon the day was over and I was out on the Greenway running.             13 years ago, I was 19 years old. I was in the process of rushing, and I was in early morning classes, and I was busy almost all the time. That was during the time of my most successful yoga practice too. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I got up early and ran from my apartment to the gym (it was about 1 mile). Once there I was running on the track, listening to a morning show, when it was interrupted in what I thought was a joke at first. There was someone talking about a...

Before I could publish my post about Ferguson, another article popped up in my newsfeed. This time about a 9 year old who shot a shooting instructor at a shooting range: 9 Year Old Shoots Instructor . It actually wouldn’t have bothered me that much- after all, any time you handle a loaded weapon you are risking death- except that the gun she was shooting was a Uzi. A Uzi. The real thing- an automatic weapon preferred by the Israelites in the 1940s. And she could not handle the recoil and started spraying fire, killing her instructor. It’s being called a “tragic accident”. But is it either? To be sure I understood that a 9 year old American girl (please don’t even TRY to compare our children to child soldiers) had been given a Uzi as a recreational toy (and yes, if it is used by a child, it is a TOY).  So I consulted Wikipedia and here is what I read: The   Uzi   ( Hebrew :   עוזי ‎, officially cased as   UZI ) is a family of   Israeli   open-bolt , ...

                My friend died. Those are words I struggle to say. I haven’t lost a friend in a long time, and when I found out on Thursday night what happened, the words stuck in my throat. When I checked my email and saw there was one from a sorority sister I hadn’t heard from in a long time, titled, “Prayers for the Sanford family…” I wasn’t expecting to read that Courtney had died that morning. And at first, it just didn’t make sense. A FB post from her had popped up in my feed that day. “The happy song makes me HAPPY.” It was posted one minute before she crossed the I-85 Business median and collided head on with a truck. The wreck blocked half of the highway for 3 hours. I saw the wreckage. I went online and looked at the photographs even though they say you shouldn’t do that. And she wasn’t in any of them. So, see, no one was driving the car therefore she wasn’t dead. I raced downstairs to show my husband, and say, “Could someone have ...