"Nothing Bad Happens Here"

Before leaving Newtown for Oregon in 1998, friends gave my wife a going away party.  Among the several small gifts was a blanket with familiar landmarks of Newtown woven through.  It has draped on the sofa in our family room since we arrived in Portland - warming us on chilly evenings and opening questions from friends which we answered eagerly, telling them about the wonderful town.

Newtown is where our children grew up - from kindergarten at Sandy Hook School until they each left for college.  My wife was on the Sandy Hook School PTA and its treasurer for a while.  As most of the homes had wells, each Thursday she conduct a fluoride "swish and spit" day at the school.   Sandy Hook was - is - a school where the Principal and teachers warmly welcomed the kids and the kids embraced them with in return.  Newtown was an ideal place to raise our family. Peaceful.  Bucolic. Charming.  Warm.  Amid the old buildings, farms, churches, friendly people and gentle countryside, I often thought "nothing bad could happen here."

On Saturday, one of our daughters, now a mother of two, wrote the following:

I grew up in Newtown and attended Sandy Hook School for five years. Every day I would board my school bus with my Trapper Keeper in hand and travel the long, winding roads that denied me any sense of direction until I moved to the Big Apple for college. My bus passed horses and cows and ducks in ponds. It passed homes that predate the birth of George Washington. 


Newtown - the town we called home

After several miles it would come to Sandy Hook, a few blocks wherein I began my first years of piano lessons, where fantastic mansions house businesses, and where one could (though no longer) find the Red Brick General Store, a nineteenth-century relic whose door handle and wooden threshold were worn almost to disrepair from decades of people entering in. The bus would turn right up the hill, and right again into the driveway of Sandy Hook School, whereupon large green footprints of the Jolly Green Giant were painted.

As students, we participated joyfully in our First Grade Show, in a school-wide production of the Nutcracker, in the annual Pancake Breakfast With Santa, in the springtime school fair (a craft from which still can be found in my parents’ home: a little mouse made from my 6-yr old fingerprints).   

A good day at school could mean it was School Store day, where, at tables in the lobby, one could buy triangular pencil grips and tiny erasers to add to our collections. It could mean having music AND gym on the same day, and those rubbery waffles being served in the lunchroom; or spending “free time” in library shimmying around and hilariously shocking each other with static electricity, and getting to erase the blackboard at the end of the day. A bad day might have seen a lost lunch ticket and a rained-out recess; or time spent lying on the leather bed in the nurse’s office with a stomach ache, waiting for mommy to take us home. 

What happened yesterday was something that Newtown had never feared because, in Newtown, such events were thought to be an impossibility. It has occurred to me that I might never again have to explain where Newtown is when asked where I grew up; it is my hope that those who ask will have read many stories like this.

Looking at the blanket that my wife was given brings us warmth but now also renews our tears. Something bad did happen in Newtown.  May God bring strength and peace to our friends, parents, children and the community we once called home.