To the Editor:
Though I am pushing 60, hearing the news from Greenwood this week felt like a punch in the stomach.
The events of the last week have been just another incident in the rash of similar news headlines over the last decade or so. My heart weeps for the families of the victims. The personal loss I feel is not quite so raw, but it’s never easy to lose the joy and innocence of your childhood
I suppose if I’d been prepared, I might still feel, not so shocked, not so uneasy. Hard to believe I spent so many happy moments in what is the latest example of “fear central.”
My family moved from Georgia to Greenwood in 1969. I am not embarrassed to admit I remember old-school Greenwood. Really old school. Like Greenwood Shopping Center without the words “Park Mall” attached. When we moved here Greenwood had an open-air mall, meaning to get from one store to another required you to go outside.
If when I was young, I’d been told to expect the kind of brutality we see today, I’d have said, “That doesn’t happen in the land of the free, the home of the brave. That is insanity.”
If not for the current trajectory of the United States I would say this is something that happens in other places, but not in the Hoosier Heartland. Not on our turf. Not in our house. Note, I did say if.
As I typed that last sentence, I heard the voice of Kevin Arnold, of TV’s Wonder Years, “I remember a place … a town … a house like a lot of other houses … a yard like a lot of other yards … on a street like a lot of other streets. And the thing is, after all these years, I still look back with wonder.”
So do I, Kevin. So do I.
Penny Franey
Martinsville
