Terrified and Terrifying

It’s been months since I’ve appeared in this space.  Mostly because I find myself with little I’m burning to say.

But today I burn.

Last week as I was leaving a friend’s home in a solidly middle-class residential neighborhood of Minneapolis, I was robbed.  At gunpoint.  I avoid guns on my television screen, but this one now lives inside me.

I had gotten into my car, started it, and delayed for a few beats to set my GPS.  (There is no live GPS in my brain, never has been, so I tend to rely on this amazing technology even when I pretty much know where I’m going.)  I was intent, completely oblivious to the enormous black SUV pulling up beside me or of the young man leaping out of the back seat.  I came aware only when my car door sprang open, suddenly and fiercely.

And as I turned to grab the door, bewildered at how such a thing could have happened, I found a shiny, silver, snub-nosed gun pointed at my face.

“Give me your purse,” the voice behind the gun said.

Even as I handed over my purse—my mind saying “NO!” and “OF COURSE!” in the same instant—I found myself noticing that the man speaking to me beyond the astonishing gun was young, slender, and somehow . . . beautiful.

That’s all I saw.

“Give me your phone,” he commanded after he had possession of my purse.  My phone was in its holder on the dashboard.  But I was screaming too loudly to comprehend and couldn’t move.  So instead of the multiple ways he might have responded, he leapt away and into the vehicle waiting for him and was gone. 

Two men from across the street appeared in response to my screams.  (I’m quite certain I have never before made such a sound in my life!)  One said, “You did exactly the right thing by screaming.”  And I thought, Was that a choice?

Amber, the police officer who arrived at my friend’s call, was professional and kind.  She kept saying, “I’m so glad you weren’t hurt.”  People have been beaten with baseball bats.  People have been shot.

My partner arrived with love and concern and another key fob for my car—mine was in my stolen purse, of course—and now I am starting the tedious process of canceling credit cards, calling auto and medical insurance for replacement cards, getting a new driver’s license, getting the locks replaced on our home, getting my car rekeyed, reassembling the life carried around in a purse.

I remind myself when I’m exhausted by the inconveniences that my brain isn’t spattered over the inside of my car.

From time to time I say to my partner, “Please hold me,” and she does . . . and in five minutes I’m up and moving again.  Something deep inside isn’t yet ready to be still.  Isn’t ready even to be held.

That night as I went to bed I tried to push away the image of that gun by doing loving kindness practice, for myself, for that young man, for this struggling world.

But the gun kept creeping back in, for all the familiar and comforting words of the practice flowing through my mind.  It was a little like that old game of being told not to think about an elephant.  Suddenly nothing could be more present.

I am profoundly grateful for the life I woke into the next morning and all the mornings since, a life that might have been gone with a single tug on that trigger.  It’s a gratitude that is familiar if sharply renewed.  I have long lived, consciously, daily, in gratitude.  In wonder and awe, too.  I don’t know how anyone can be part of this world for eighty-three years and not be suffused with gratitude and wonder and awe.

The image of the gun stays, but the young man behind it does, too.  Curiously, though I had seen him as beautiful, I couldn’t describe him to the police.  At all.  I suspect—I’m pretty sure—he was only a boy, but I don’t know that either.  The men across the street who came out to help could identify his race and that he was wearing a mask, but I couldn’t have named even that.

That moment, though, reinforces something that has been weighing on my heart for a long time. 

We are failing as a society.  Utterly. 

Failing through our divisions that keep us condemning rather than asking what those others we so disagree with might want and need. 

Failing because of the cowboy mentality that honors the individual at the expense of community.  Our community.

Failing by teaching our young to compete instead of to nurture.    To nurture one another.  To nurture themselves.

Gandhi was once asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?”  His reply?  “I think it would be a good idea.”

I think it would be a good idea, too.

I wonder where we begin.

Perhaps by loving the terrified and terrifying young men in possession of guns?