Girls sometimes reach motherhood before womanhood, boys become fathers before they become men.
Sometimes we bear the weight of the world's meanness before we learn that its goodness can carry the load for us. And sometimes death comes to interrupt rather than punctuate life. Nothing illustrates life's tendency toward disorder more than that litany of individual tragedies we familiarly call school shootings. Young lives en masse are irretrievably altered or ended, some by the shooter's bullet, others by death close enough to feel for the first time, and many more by the fear that suddenly clouds their existence. Calif. Those of us who are far past our school years keep looking for easy answers to a problem we never faced.