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| The Alamo in San Antonio |
I had to travel 1,100 miles to begin writing. The writing began because I had emotions I couldn’t handle internally and had some vague notion that sharing these thoughts with others would help.
I believe it was a Thursday afternoon and my wife, youngest son and I had made a trip to a toy store to buy a birthday present. As we pulled through the outer parking lot of the giant mall, I heard gun shots. I sped up, moving away from where I thought the shots had come.
I remember that Julie asked why I did so and I told her those were gunshots. “I thought they were firecrackers,” she said.
“No, they were gunshots. I don’t think we would have heard firecrackers in the car with the air conditioner running.” We continued the discussion on the way home, with my wife holding out for firecrackers.
The next morning, the San Antonio Express-News had a front page story about a gang shoot-out near a bus stop in the mall parking lot. Two rival gangs happened to show up at the bus stop at the same time and the insults, curses and general smack talk began. Then someone said something that someone else responded to with a pistol. Quickly, multiple people were firing wildly at each other.
Despite the flurry of shots, the gang-bangers were unscathed. One woman, minding her own business as she sat waiting on a bus, was killed by a stray shot.
I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember the woman’s name. I should remember because the event had a lasting effect on me. I do remember that she was a never-married, middle-aged church secretary. She lived with and cared for her invalid father who was no longer able to live alone.
The senselessness of this woman’s death, caused by a young person who obviously put little value on his own life, was absurd. It simply was not the way life was supposed to work. The woman could not afford a car, so she had to take the bus. Life seemed to have taken the long way around to bring her to that bus stop on a particular Thursday afternoon when words turned into bullets and life turned into death.
I think it was the futility, the absolute hopelessness of the situation that drove me to write about it. As if I could define the event, put it in writing, then I could exert some control over it and thus my own life. Believe me, I’m writing about this with far more insight now than I had at the time. Back then, I only knew I had to write about it.
I didn’t submit my piece to a San Antonio newspaper. Instead I mailed it to my hometown newspaper, The Dodge County News. The editor was a long-time friend and he liked it. In retrospect, it was far too sentimental, but he printed it as a column with the understanding that there would be more. I agreed and began writing.
In the beginning, I wrote about different things, but my focus always came back to politics. Soon, my column From Where I Stand focused almost entirely on politics. Occasionally, I would write about some local event, but it was nearly all politics.
