The Side Effects of Endorphins

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

Arlington, Va.

It can touch your life

We are all little atoms that collide and form molecules and then life altering changes. However, for the most part most of what we do is trivial and random. It is religion of sorts. It is a religion where the end game is not the mission. Rather it is whom we affect along the way.

 

It was a Friday evening, and I just finished my work week at my finance job out in Maryland. I relaxed on an empty Metro train through the District of Columbia and looked forward to going for a run. It was a balmy spring day, and the cherry blossoms were a harbinger of the warm season ahead. Spring was magical in Washington, DC. It usually never crept up rather it sprung on you unexpectedly.

 

I took the bus from the Pentagon to the bus station by the house and walked the final pleasant blocks back to the house. The transit center at the pentagon smelled of diesel and the dank acode air coming from the underground trains. For some reason, I liked that smell. It reminded me that I had made it. I always wanted to live in DC and here I was getting off the train in a place most people would recognize.

It was a picture-perfect spring day, and I was excited for a weekend. I stopped and talked to two neighbor kids who were sitting quietly on the front porch. I knew these kids were not of legal drinking age as the young man who lived there was in his first year at the local community college.  He was a sweet kid who was usually quick with a smile.  When he smiled it was infectious. I remember him being more serious than I was at that age. Arlington was full of bungalows-built years ago as summer homes for lawmakers in DC. It was the oldest house on the block; the house was painted sky blue. It was not a pretty sky blue. It was neither blue nor the color of the sky.

 

We were close with all the neighbors on that block in Arlington. We were the new kids on the block, yet fit in rather easily. It was a close-knit community. That is except for the sky-blue house. We got along great with the kids however the father was a spot of bother. Jim was a simple man, and he was usually pleasant to talk to. However, he was a loud proponent of the NRA, and it rubbed most people, on our block, the wrong way. Still, we all supported Jim.  He was a single father and we included him in cookouts and backyard gatherings, and he always showed up with an assortment of Budweiser and various humorous, yet difficult to follow stories.

 

His son and a friend I did not know where sitting on the porch and greeted me warmly. I asked them what they were up to for the evening. They indicated they were hanging out on the porch and drinking beer. These were noble aspirations given the circumstances. The windows were open and they were blasting an album by The Marshall Tucker band.

 

Our house was a minute walk away. With little hesitation I walked in the front door and was greeted by our Beagle Lucy. We were planning a trip to Germany, so I practiced my German on the Beagle. She tilted her head to the left,  indicating she understood my inflection

“Wir gehen laufen”

 

We headed out the door a few minutes later. I was a pretty competitive runner, but tonight  we took our time. I noticed the sky had turned darker and the air felt like rain. The boys on the porch yelled to us to have a nice run. I only planned on running forty-five minutes that day. It was a very easy run mostly taking in the sweet aromatics of spring.  Per my usual, it was a looped course that took us through 4-Mile Run. Lucy enjoyed playing in the water in this lush  little park.

 

One bad habit I have, when I am out running, is that when I hear fire sirens , I do a mental checklist of ‘Did I unplug the iron or leave on a stove burner, or something similar. In my mind it was always my house that was burning down. It always left me a bit unsettled. With approximately a mile left, in this particularly quiet run, I noticed a buzz of police activity in the area. The scream of sirens unsettled me to the core. To be fair, South Arlington had more than its fair share of police activity. However, this was highly unusual. Lucy and I hurried our way home through the last uphill mile.

 

I turned the corner on our street taking the same familiar route I had taken from the bus stop ninety minutes previous. I could sense the activity from blocks away. There in front of the house where the boys had been drinking beer sat three police cars with flashing lights ablaze. I put Lucy in our house and slowly walked back to the house where the boys once sat. I walked right past the policemen and approached the now eerie looking sky-blue house. Before I reached the front door, our neighbors Sharon and Armando greeted me. They nodded their heads and said nothing for a good long time. It could have been five seconds it could have been five minutes. The silence hung in the air with ac vague scent of gunpowder. To be more precise, something had been ignited. I didn’t  know the smell of gunpowder previous to that day.

 

One of the policemen at the house pulled me aside and started asking me questions. I simply relayed the story about the brief conversation I had before I went for my run. I started getting chilly as the sweated turned crusty on my skin.

 

The officer told me that things did not look good. Apparently after I left for the run, the boys had “broken into” their father’s gun cabinet. It was a toy to them, some  kind of game. Jim’s son had been playing with the gun and it accidentally fired into the body of his friend. More specifically, the bullet entered right below his ear. That’s mostly conjecture, reconstructed from things I would hear later.

 

I asked if the boy was going to be okay.  The officer simply said No. He may have been dead at the time. I really do not know.  They wheeled the body out five minutes later as all the neighbors on 21st Street stood together silently in a fog that rolled in for the evening. There were no words to say. There were no emotions to be had. This isn’t a moment you prepare for.  It just happens and it progresses rapidly.

 

The police told us this was an accidental shooting and there were not going to be any charges in the case unless they received other information. They interviewed Jim’s son, and he could hardly form a sentence. I am not sure if they interviewed Jim in much detail. In retrospect I find that rather curious.

 

What do you do as a neighborhood after an incident such as this? We did what we always did, and we tried to help each other. The usual instinct is to run and hide from an incident such as this. What we did as a community was, we did our best to keep Jim’s son calm. We all brought a little something over to eat so he would have a little community and assure him it was not his fault. In retrospect it wasn’t. That is something I believe we all reflect on to this day.

 

There was a common thought going through all our minds. What it must be like for the father on the other end of the line receiving the news that his son was no longer part of this world.

 

 

The last memory of that night was when Jim’s father came into the room. We all more or less asked him the same questions.

 

“Jim how can we help?”

 

He replied, “Do you know how to get blood stains out of carpet?”

 

That is the last thing I remember. I reflect often on many of the unanswered questions of that night. I know we all do. That sentence has been stuck in my mind for years. The simple callousness with which the sentence was delivered. The stain shall come out, death is permanent.

==============

And how things have changed.

Michigan prosecutors recently charged a father for violating the state’s newly enacted safe storage law after his son allegedly got a hold of a firearm and shot himself in the face in their home.

Theo Nichols’ 8-year-old son was in “extremely critical condition,” at a Detroit hospital following the April 19 incident, police in Warren, Michigan, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Investigators said the boy used a chair to access the handgun which was “unsafely” and insecurely stored on top of a kitchen cabinet.