One Saturday in May

     One week in May of 2016, I was doing something I haven't done in more than a year, which is floating to other stores in the company for which I work.  Riding the bike home, I realized that the store I was leaving is just down the street from the infamous Columbine High School.  May you not have the misfortune to live in infamous times.  I had wanted to pay a visit to this memorial at the top of what I understand is Rebel Hill, of the Columbine High Rebels.  I was living here when the name Columbine became more than just the name of a neighborhood.  I remember the "trenchcoat mafia," the new county sheriff who had just begun his dream job, the disputed official timeline of events, the cobbled together SWAT team from neighboring departments who waited hours to enter the school as a faculty member bled to death while holding a sign to a window alerting them to his wounds, a friend of one perpetrator who warned the police, 15 crosses put up and two taken down far more quickly than the others.
     I've recently read a couple of magazine articles and a very good book about events leading up to that day in April of 1999.  And I have seen black and white surveillance footage from security cameras, one frame of which made a Time magazine cover; the footage strikingly disconnected from the bewildering terror which must have been.  I had never been to the school or in the neighborhood, but I had heard it described as a wealthy kind of suburbia, playing into a witches' brew-narrative of aloof residents and a class-repressive high school culture.  I remember it striking a chord with me at the time.  I also remember not being able to imagine doing what these two newly minted cultural anti-figures would end up being known for.  After the shootings, there was much made of the social environment of the shooters, much of it by themselves.  As I rode up the side of one boulevard faced by the school, I didn't see any of what I had read of the killers' description of their own community; some futile and doomed kind of existence.  That kind of moniker has become familiar of those members of the school shooter club.  'Futile and doomed' is a vision through their stale, steely grey eyes.  "The die is cast," wrote in Latin the shooter here at Arapahoe High School.
     The neighborhood through which I cruised is in fact a mixture of walled off mansions and some land zoned for horses, as well as tiny strip malls slated for demolition.  The place is but one piece of a patchwork quilt, which is the greater Denver metro area.  I wheeled up on a spring afternoon with grey skies and a cold wind.  The memorial is located in a park with sports fields, and a baseball game was going on.  I didn't stay more than a few minutes.  The memorial strikes me as hidden away, even though it is right next to the school.  A sign at the entrance asks that no bikes enter the memorial, which consists of a circular outside wall with comments from students at the time, and a circular inside stone monument in the center, with words about each of the 13 killed.  It's something of a populist kind of monument, not to figures with a relationship to national aspiration, but, as a plaque at this entrance suggests, to individuals who we consider "typical of so many across America."  The sanctity of our future citizens is something which was set ablaze on that say, as the concept of the "school shooting" was sliced into being with the loss of these lives.  1970 was the very end of the 1960s, and it ended with the shooting of four students at a public university.  The verdict on the Kent State shootings has, perhaps in the national consciousness, more to do with attempting to understand shooting of young adult students in the terms of conflict between politics and between generations.  If each decade of the nation carries its own unforeseen pain, this one ended the 1990s.

     I can't think of anything
     That's makes me more upset
     People talk of this rhetoric
     "Forgive but not forget"
     I don't rape and I don't pillage
     Other people's lives
     I don't practice what you preach and I don't see through your eyes
          - Bob Mould, 1983 (the year I graduated high school)