Dude, You Are So Not Immortal

I don’t know your name and can only make a logical guess at your age given that you are a Crescenta Valley High student. (I've taken to calling you the "Tall Teen Twerp" lately.) But your smug face and stupidly reckless actions will be hard to forget. You are tall, with an average build and longish, blondish hair that you probably love to flip away from your eyes with great disdain at anyone without your level of awesomeness.

You probably didn’t give a second thought to our little encounter two weeks ago, so I’ll refresh your memory. That Tuesday, on a typically beautiful late Southern California summer afternoon, long after most of your classmates at CV High had left the campus, you and maybe seven or eight of your friends were on the sidewalk in front of school, just above the auditorium. As I drove down Ramsdell Avenue (in front of school), I noticed your group walking, laughing – happy to be finished with classes for the day, heading towards hump-day.

Almost at the same moment as your group was about to step off the sidewalk and onto Ramsdell (nowhere near a crosswalk, of course) you all noticed my vehicle heading towards you. Everybody stopped in their tracks and didn’t step off the curb. Except you. You saw me coming. There was no way you didn’t. Your friends all yelled at you to stop. But you kept walking without a hitch in your swagger. And so, dripping with cool and staring straight ahead, you walked across the street and directly in front of my oncoming 11,800-pound pickup truck.

I thought of so many things within the milliseconds that followed. That you were an idiot, of course, but also that you were somebody’s son. Maybe someone’s brother. As my right foot stomped on the brake and I straight-armed the horn button, my staccato thoughts continued – that this was likely going to be really bad, was going to ruin your school year at the very least and holy crow what will happen to my insurance rates and how ironic will it be to see a news story about this tragedy in the same paper that publishes this column and I hope his friends will back me up that he walked right in front of me and what could this chucklehead be thinking playing chicken with an oncoming truck?!?

Thankfully, I was somehow able to stop before bouncing you off my hood and changing both of our worlds forever. But here’s the thing, even coming within inches of getting hit – even with my horn blaring at you for a full minute at least – even with your friends screaming from the sidewalk and me yelling things out my open window that I would never want my pastor to hear – even then; you didn’t flinch, didn’t slow down, didn’t so much as glance my way.

Your “I’m so badass I can’t possibly be hit” smirk didn’t falter. You weren’t listening to music; no cords dangled from your ears. Most likely, you were listening to some inner narcissistic soundtrack that continuously affirms your greatness. In your mind, you walk on water, I’m sure.

Maybe your friends or a teacher who saw what almost happened that day ripped you a new one after I drove on. I hope so. But I’m pretty sure you would ignore them as easily as you ignored my blaring horn and screeching tires. (Was it just your dumb luck or mine that I’d had new tires installed literally the day before? I wonder.)

Enjoy this season while it lasts, buddy. There’s a big (way bigger than you), hard reality waiting for you beyond the insular bubble of high school life. The next time you pull some stunt like that, the person behind the wheel may not be paying such close attention to his or her surroundings. Or he may be changing the music on the stereo. Or, God forbid, doing something even more potentially lethal, like texting as he careens towards your foolish, arrogant little self.
Dude, it’s going to take many years for you to grow up and learn that you’re not nearly as invincible (or cool) as you think. I only hope you stay alive long enough for that to happen.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Shared Shock and Sorrow

It was around 12:45 last Friday afternoon when I returned to my office from a physical therapy session on my bum knee. The familiar ping from my phone alerted me that a new text message was waiting. It was from my son at college down near San Diego asking me if I knew what had just happened at Crescenta Valley High – the high school in our small bedroom community on the fringes of sprawling Los Angeles. I had no idea what his text was asking.

At almost the exact same moment I was reading my son’s message, my sister called on our house phone (yes, we still have one of those and no, it isn’t a pay phone) asking if I had heard anything from the staff at the CV Weekly newspaper (the newspaper that runs my weekly column) about the big breaking news. My sister has a son who’s a senior at CV High who had been texting her with what he knew was happening. I think she – like many of my regular readers – assumed that because I write a column for the paper each week I have the inside scoop on any buzz going on in the newsroom on any given day. Not hardly.

As my sister relayed the hard-to-believe news about a possible suicide at CVHS, I suddenly noticed the drone of multiple helicopters hovering somewhere high above the 210 freeway. That sound is always the first indicator that something big is happening up here in our normally calm and quiet valley.

Sure enough, as the minutes ticked by last Friday afternoon, we all quickly learned more about the tragic suicide of the sophomore student. As sketchy and often wrong as the rapidly passed-along details of the event may have been, it reminded me again that we are all connected to each other’s lives like never before in the history of humanity.

With the increasing saturation of smart phones (do you know a single teenager or pre-teen without his/her own mobile phone?), iPads, laptops and near universal access to the Internet, along with apps like Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging and others – our ability to share news or events within literally seconds of it happening is stunning. Much of the time the shared information is trivial and inane at best. But sometimes, like last Friday, the news can stun.

Then, in one of those oddly connected, not-so-random bookends that the universe throws at us every so often, the very next day after the horrific event at CV High, information channels all over the world were ablaze with tragic (yet not entirely unexpected for anyone familiar with her struggles and addictions) news of another untimely death – pop superstar and once-gifted singer, Whitney Houston.

Although one could certainly argue that Ms. Houston’s death was also the result of a suicide – albeit a long-term and not nearly as deliberate an effort – it’s safe to say that both of these sad souls must have been terribly troubled individuals. I can’t help but wonder, with so many available ways to connect with other people, how is it possible that anyone today could live with such loneliness and despair that they ultimately disconnect from life itself?

Our family did not know the young man who died last week. And yet, we are connected. My wife and I are both proud alums of Crescenta Valley High. Three of our four kids graduated from there. My own two brothers and one sister graduated from CV as did one of my sisters-in-law. And as I noted above, I have a nephew who will graduate from CV this coming June. To say the least, we are a Falcon family to the core.

As such, we all grieve the loss of one of our own and send our prayers and condolences to all of those directly affected by this unfathomable tragedy. The school, this community, will forever be a different place because of what happened at the start of the lunch period on an otherwise typical February day in the Foothills.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 2.16.12, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

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