Tag Archives: college

THAT Text—will you get it next?

Posted on by

Yesterday I got that text. The one parents all over the United States have been getting. It’s never expected or wanted. It’s not welcome at all. But as of now we’ve done absolutely nothing to stop it.

At 5:51 p.m. my son texted me, “Crap there’s a shooter on campus.”

For the next several hours we texted and called back and forth. I’m lucky. My son was safe in his dorm. His friends were scattered across campus, one in the library that was fired on, another in the student union. Others hunkered down in classrooms and halls. Slowly word got out that the shooter was caught. Buildings were cleared and students were allowed to leave.

At 11:28 p.m. I texted my son again to make sure all was well and he said it was. His roommates were back, having been released from where they’d sheltered. He was going to bed, hungry because the dining hall was closed and he had no food in his room. Hungry but alive and safe. I got to tell him I love him again.

That text is coming for every parent out there. Until our Congress implements sensible gun control measures, we are all in danger of getting it. Until the NRA’s power over us is cast off, every parent sends their kid off to school knowing that it might be their child sending them that text next.

The shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte barely caused a blip on the radar of most politicians and news organizations. By the numbers, the shooting wasn’t that bad, right? Only two people died. Only four people were injured. Only two families had to be notified that their students wouldn’t come home. Only four had to wait in anguish for word that their loved ones were out of surgery.

Can we really judge it by the numbers, though? Because the only number that matters, really, is one. One more school shooting. One more time that lives were ended when common sense gun control could have stopped it. One more time kids texted their parents.

So, if you’re happy with waiting for that text from your kid, go ahead, sit back, relax. This was just one shooting. But it only took one shooting to end the lives of two college students yesterday.

You’ll get that text eventually unless we stop this now.

The Next Chapter: Moving a Friend Away

Posted on by
white car traveling near trees during daytime

Photo by Tim Gouw on Pexels.com

This weekend, I helped a friend move five hours away. It was tough. Setting him up in his new place and knowing I could no longer see him every single day. Of course, the move is a good one for him. More opportunity for growth and friendships and education.

Yes, I joined the ranks of parents leaving their first-born at college. I know it’s a good thing, but I couldn’t help but think that I would miss him fiercely, this baby-turned-man in a blink of an eye. He’s always been a part of me and always will be, though, so I square my shoulders and march on.

After all, I’m not losing a son or a friend. I’m helping him be a better man and friend to others.

Turning to other things, I have a GoodReads giveaway going on now! Enter to win one of fifty copies of Becoming Magic here: Becoming Magic GoodReads Giveaway. Also, I’ll be at Lisa Haselton’s Reviews and Interviews on Monday morning promoting Becoming Magic, so be sure to join me there. Plus, there’s a giveaway!

I love the word “epiphany”. Here’s mine from today.

Posted on by

I’m not home right now, and maybe that’s why I’m a little more sensitive…and observant. I’m actually in the little town I went to college in, and it seems like everywhere I look, I see myself twenty-odd years younger. The idea that I might catch a glimpse of myself from those glory days when I was more beautiful than I thought and not nearly as smart as I believed makes me look a little closer at the people I pass. And today that led me to an epiphany.

God, I do love that word. And it describes what I felt so perfectly. It was like an explosion of perfect knowledge inside my head.

It was as I passed by a beautiful young woman dressed in a business suit. She couldn’t have been much older than the college students, and she looked tired. I began to imagine her story because she reminded me of me at that age. She’d just come from a job interview. She has a few more classes to finish up in summer school and then she’ll have her degree in business administration or education or library science or economics. Her future is full of uncertainty and promise and she’s having a hard time dealing with everything that’s being thrown at her but she’s doing her best.

And I started wondering why I knew that. And BAM!

I realized it’s because she’s just like me. She’s walking along, keeping all her emotions in check and all her worries and insecurities safely beneath the surface so I won’t see them. But I know them because they’re mine, too. Or they were at one time. And that’s when it really hit me that we’re all the same. We’re all insecure. We all worry about tomorrow and our imperfect bodies and our health and losing the people we love. We all try to keep it under wraps so we don’t freak out the other guy. But the other guy’s doing the same thing. And for just a second as I walked down the street, I could see it clearly. The girl I was passing, the old man sitting on the side of the road offering to have his dog do tricks for a dollar, the biker, the people waiting at the bus stop. And me.

All souls contained by the thin skin of our bodies.

What would happen if everyone everywhere suddenly had that same epiphany? What if we all realized that those little things don’t matter and we can’t change how other people see us and those people are worrying about how we see them, anyway? What if we all stopped trying to suck in our stomachs and say the exact right thing and not look too closely at the people we don’t think we want to know?

Like all explosions, this one was over quickly. What I’m writing now comes only from the last embers of it. It doesn’t come close to the moment of perfect knowledge, but at least I can share this much of it.