What is (N)ormal?
I wrote this piece in 2017 and decided to publish it now, too many shootings to keep track of today. That is one of the tragedies of America…
I don’t have prayers to impart upon you today, I have thoughts, and a story that has a lot to do with what just happened, and what is happening in many schools and public spaces across the country… I want to talk to you about what we call normal.
I am from the town of Normal… I went to Normal Community High School — go Ironmen, and yes our girls’ teams were the Lady Ironmen. Normal is where my father landed a teaching job at Illinois State University. Where my mother, a transplanted French woman, learned the quirks of American midwesterners. She was especially challenged by the concept of a Red Lobster restaurant being considered a gourmet meal in the late 70s and early 80s. My sister and I grew up in a solid normal public school system when we weren’t in French public school when my dad was fortunate enough to direct the university’s study abroad program.
Normal is:
The town with a large water tower featured in a Pizza Hut commercial — “What do (n)Normal people eat?”
The town with a sports rivalry with Bloomington — the other twin city
The town that is home to one synagogue.
The historic home of Illinois State Normal University, originally a teacher’s college (thus the name).
The town where I would run out through cornfields for miles to train for the next challenge, with hopes of making it to the next level.
The town with breakdance contests at Chuck E. Cheese’s that showed me my first terrifying racist incident.
The town with public and private schools, universities, farmers, professors, bank tellers, teachers, and students.
The town where I witnessed a high school shooting in 1987.
This story is about what we may start to think of as normal-
It was October, it was Normal, it was Illinois. But this was not normal. We were wearing ties (we never wore ties), bound for the state tournament, we had our best shoes on with slippery leather soles, the ones from the Father and Son at College Hills Mall that were only for special occasions. I bought into the group momentum and followed my senior teammates to the Burger King across the street from my school, a place I had never been before. To this day I can’t remember if I ate anything, but there are a few images that will never leave my mind:
- Holding the back door open for my friends, and hearing the multiple POPS!, seeing frantic movement through the glass.
- That’s when time dilation took its hold, Burger King seemed to be expelling people, pouring them out in all directions.
- I looked across the parking lot, barely getting traction in my special shoes, and sliding between two cars close to the door and hitting the ground.
- Looking up and seeing a high school kid being dragged across the parking lot by his friends, his lost shoe, to lay dying on the ground about 50 feet from where he was shot, 10 feet from where I was hiding.
- Getting up, going back to school, to class, to the yellow school bus, to the first round of state.
An epilogue- my dad told me he never would have imagined I was there, he knew I was not a big fan of Burger King. What came out days later was that both boys had been fighting over the week before the shooting, and the shooter had had enough, brought his father’s handgun to the Burger King, and ended another person’s life. Days later, there was a bomb threat at the school. There were random counselors roaming the hall asking if we were all right. We went back to normal, but Normal would never be normal again…
I guess if there’s a lesson here it’s that nobody knows how they will react in such a traumatic situation. In these situations, normal flees the building… I later had another close call in my 20s and my reaction was drastically different. People can theorize what more guns would add to the equation — safety or chaos.
But there is no way to predict outcomes, lives ended and broken, and the stress of memory. Personally, all I do know is that the destructive power of a firearm needs to be taken seriously…those of us who have seen a shooting, a life ended violently, know this in a way that no one else does. There is no normal when it comes to a person deciding to use such a powerful weapon, let’s try to remember that as we try to move on with what’s unfolding in front of us.
