Recently I have been exploring cyber-social networking. One week after joining Facebook, I had nearly 100 friends in my network. I was connected to whom I wanted to be connected; then I heard from the sibling of elementary school chum.
Siblings of school chums? Why? Do I need to know that Dane Starbuck, the younger brother of my best friend in high school, is attending his son’s soccer game in Carmel Indiana. Even so, curiosity had me “Googling” Dane just to see if I could find out something about his brother Steve. What came up in my search were two books Dane had written about my hometown of Winchester Indiana.
One, a biography about Pierre Goodrich a former Governor of Indiana. The other book was a novel “To Love an African Violet”. Then next thing I knew, I was ordering the book on Amazon.com. It arrived last Wednesday.
Thursday morning I was numb from all the news of Sandra Cantu. I just couldn’t take anymore news. As a diversion, I decided to read Dane’s book hoping that it would take my mind off my sadness. About 100 pages in Dane describe an event in the one of his characters life that came directly from my childhood.
“I was comforted by familiar sounds of the trains rumbling through our backyard…but there was another sound, a more distant one that was even more comforting. Each day at 7:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., I would stop whatever I was doing, as if a Muslim obeying the daily ritual of prayers, to listen to the whistle blows at the Local Glass Works – everything in the town revolved around those shift changes.”
That passage took me back to a time when I was Sandra’s age. A childhood filled with good memories and comforting sounds. I knew when that whistle blew; I would either have 8 hours of no supervision, or I had exactly ten minutes to beat my parents home. My parents worked at the glass factory and while they worked – I played. I was out and about all over town riding my bike, studying at the library and hanging out with friends, it was a time and a place when it was safe for me to be on my own. When I read that passage – grief swelled and tears rolled down my face.
I believe that there are no accidents. I needed to read that passage at that moment. I’m thankful that “technology” led me to Dane. In order to grieve, I had to go home. However, I’m sorry that in a world of social networking – where everybody knows every aspect of one another’s life, it’s somehow unsafe for a child to play alone. As a community we must change this. And we must do it to honor Sandra’s legacy.
First published in the Tracy Press on April 15, 2009
