Several decades ago this month I was 15, and I was really mad at my mom. She made me come home from my best friend’s house, simply because she was freaked out. My brother had left several hours earlier to visit his girlfriend but never arrived. I was mortified at her overprotectiveness — stifling and neverending. The second I got home, I bitched at her about being said freak, flopped roughly onto the couch, and glared at the TV, determined to be annoyed for weeks.
He was stuck in traffic, the police said. There was a miles-long traffic jam downtown, and he would call as soon as it al cleared. I was decidedly uncomforting as she paced the hallway for another hour: phone on the wall in the kitchen to a diamond window in the front door. I swore I was adopted.
When the doorbell rang she was on the phone, so I snapped that I would get it. My breath billowed white as November poured in. All the years I played with his daughter, I had never seen Mr. Ritter in his uniform. And there was another man — in one of those lumberjack shirts tucked into jeans — small and wiry. As Mr. Ritter spoke softly and my mother crumpled to the floor, I focused on a boundary between fuzzy red and black squares near the small man’s name tag: “Chaplain.”
The parade of people arrived for hours, all wanting something of me or wanting to give me something. There were things to say, ways to act. My mom needed me, they said. My dad, who was never there, was there, crying like he’d never cried. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t belong. There had been some kind of existential shift between colors; this was not my world.
Later that night I escaped gladly across the street to the Gilberts, gasping for quiet, for normal. In a lightly musty basement TV room, I flipped through channels, searching and empty. I didn’t notice at first that the newscaster was standing in front of a red hot fire of mangled metal, truck entwined with car. The witnesses’ story of the drunk trying to run away into the darkness, the helicopters carrying survivors away, and the heroic but failed rescue effort for that one boy: all seemed beamed in from somewhere else. It seared into my brain — fire and screams and smell — before I could quite put it all together.
My fingers were cold. The remote wasn’t working. This was not my world. Shifted. Finally, I turned it off, red to black.
— — — — — — —
My 19 year-old brother, Glen— ‘Cardinal’ on those weird message boards only computer geeks had heard of in the late 80s, ‘Ultim’ when he was Dungeon Master for his friends, and ‘G’ to me — died when a drunk driver in a stolen refrigeration truck slammed at high speed into him and several other cars stopped at the main intersection in our town in New England. I’ve relived this story every year since.
Save your family, or someone else’s, a memory like this, a day like this. Please don’t drink and drive.

