I want to thank everyone who reads this blog for the emails, the comments of condolences – on the event of the murder of my childhood friend Glenda.
Michele, another good friend of mine, remained friends with Glenda into adulthood, and left a beautiful comment in the post below, about Glenda – who Glenda was, as an adult, what this world has lost by Glenda’s murder. It’s a tragedy.
It makes me think how precious and fragile this life is – how precious and fragile our existence is here. How ‘counting our blessings’ must not be something we do when things go wrong, when things are bad – but it must be a daily practice. Perhaps this is a mundane thing to realize, but I don’t care. I am reminded, once again, of my deep love for all of my friends, my family, all my cousins and extended family, and also my family here on this blog. I can never express it enough.
Glenda actually starred in one of my Diary entries that I posted here – and it conveys PERFECTLY who she was for me, what a funny funny girl she was, so filled with a comedic sensibility. Not everybody is, you know. But Glenda had it in spades. If something was funny, she went after it like a banshee. She loved to laugh.
So here is the excerpt, in memory of my childhood friend:
January 23, 1983
Today has been really quiet. I went to church and Sunday school, and I sat with Glenda V. in church. I had forgotten how funny she was!
I remember in 4th grade, Dee Dee wanted to get together a rock group – she wanted to call it The Shooting Stars – and we had one rehearsal at Erica’s house, in which we sang for about 5 minutes, got into fights, and broke the closet door so that Carolyn got trapped.
Anyway, the whole thing was so ridiculous. We all sat on Erica’s bed, trying to sing these 60s hippie songs, from one book that Dee Dee had.
O.K. Now Dee Dee had this old battered guitar that was so out of tune it wasn’t even funny, and Dee Dee’s voice was this weepy off-tune thing. And she looked like a hippy with her long disheveled frizzy hair, and jeans jumpsuit, and just watching her strum dreamily along on this twangy guitary and singing a ballad, shakily, swaying, her eyes closed – it was just hysterical.
And Glenda and I have always had a problem with going into hopeless hysterics at crucially serious moments.
So anyway, just watching Dee Dee was enough, but Glenda leaned over to me, during the singing, and murmured, “I’m going to stuff a handkerchief in my mouth so I won’t laugh out loud.”
Well, this obviously made things worse.
Whenever Dee Dee opened her mouth to sing, Glenda would calmly and matter-of-factly open her mouth wide and stuff the handkerchief all the way in. And that would send me absolutely rolling off the bed.
So The Shooting Stars obviously didn’t get very far.
Glenda is so funny. Glenda told me to come to the Prout mixer that was open to all schools, so that a bunch of girls wouldn’t be standing around dancing with each other, and I want to go.
I hope that Michele can convey the sorrow of your blog’s readers to Glenda’s family. The first thought that came to mind on reading your story was: how about her parents? When you raise a child, you expend so much energy trying to make a happy, productive human being out of the half savage / half angelic creature with whose care nature has charged you. You change diapers and soothe skinned knees and calm tantrums first and foremost because you love them, but underneath there is the primal drive: you are sending this creature, this piece of yourself, into a world that you will not see. Loosing a child breaks your heart on so many levels, and it breaks that unspoken (perhaps unrecognized) biological contract nature (or God if you wish) made with you: care for this little person and you will in some way be immortal. Previous generations dealt with early death by having tons of kids so that a few would survive the parents, but in today’s world we put so much effort into a few kids because we don’t expect disease or marauders to cut down our offspring. But that tighter bond with a few children leaves us very vulnerable to this kind of tragedy.
When I hear of things like this, thinking of sending children into this crazy world turns my stomach into knots. But Glenda obviously touched lives, yours not the least, so her life was not in vain. I know that right now those thoughts are small comfort to her parents. But when you think of how much evil in our present world is the direct result of the misdeeds of our ancestors, and how much of what we cherish in our world is the result of wise decisions and kindness practiced by our ancestors, Glenda’s life will reach into the future every time you tell a story about her or any of her friends makes a better choice in life because of the person they remembered her to be. It’s only that thought that can keep us sane in the face of tragedies like these.
I pray for her parents.
John –
Me too.
I get so sick of these stories, cowardly little men killing someone because they can’t control them.
The only solution to this problem is for us, as a society, to raise fewer emotionally crippled boys. I can’t claim to be wise enough to know how to make that happen…