Sixteen years ago, I moved with my parents and newborn sister to Newtown, Conn. We had officially outgrown my mom and dad’s first home in nearby Danbury, and they were lured by the hallmarks of all sound communities.
An almost nonexistent crime rate. Strong, cohesive neighborhoods. A public schools system to which hard-working parents could entrust their children.
“It was a family community,” my mom told me Sunday night. “I don’t know how else to put it.”
I attended Sandy Hook Elementary School for two and a half years, starting in third grade and ending halfway through fifth grade, when a new school was built for fifth and sixth graders across town. As the inaugural class of Reed Intermediate School in January 2003, my exhilarated classmates and I painted commemorative tiles that still adorn the main lobby and mused at the automatic flush toilets and electronic bell system that would have seemed futuristic back at Sandy Hook. We forged our times on the bathroom sign-out sheet simply to roam the new building, which was built to ease overcrowding in Newtown Public Schools.
Meanwhile, my sister entered kindergarten at Sandy Hook. I ridiculed her teacher’s polysyllabic name and acted like a hardened veteran of the elementary school’s hallways. I teased her about bumping into our mom, a former special education teacher who worked for two years in Sandy Hook’s language arts department.
My mom mentored kindergarten, first- and second-grade students in reading skills. She remembers friendly, eager pupils who inspired a dedicated staff day after day.
When we were not in school, we partook in a timeless pastime of any Newtown resident: Complaining about the sleepy burg’s lack of activity. So we played recreational soccer for the end-of-game Popsicles, ventured into the New England forest with nothing but urban legends in tow and salivated over which sneakers we would pick out the next time we visited Foot Locker at the Danbury Fair Mall. We sometimes got in trouble, holding our breath as we bounced off the school bus to apprehensive parents who may or may not have gotten The Call from the principal.
Everybody knew each other, and there were few people that would have preferred it any other way. Families almost instinctively gathered at the Newtown Ice Cream Shop, with its faded “gone fishin'” sign that seemed to govern the Northeastern seasons more than Mother Nature herself. Parents filled soccer coaches’ requests for halftime orange slices like clockwork, and if you volunteered to pick up the gnawed remains, maybe you wouldn’t have to play goalie in the second half.
Yeah, Sunday mass was a grueling hour that could have been spent sleeping in, but at least you could find a willing classmate in the pew across from you with whom you could exchange periodic eye rolls. Plus, Father Bob — the first face most Americans saw after President Barack Obama spoke in Newtown on Sunday night — once took all the altar-servers-in-training out for ice cream, and my chocolate-covered cone transformed into a heart-breaking puddle while I ran to the bathroom, so I always kind of hoped for a refund.
My family liked Newtown. We lived there for eight years in two houses. My dad got a job transfer to northeastern Indiana in 2004, and my memories of Newtown slowly faded. I became engulfed in the mounting pressures of a high school experience that would please the admissions offices at distant places like Northwestern, in major cities that had never heard of Newtown.
Until now.
An old family friend was meeting with several administrators on Friday morning when Adam Lanza — the unassuming boy beaming in my sixth-grade yearbook — burst into Sandy Hook Elementary School and permanently redefined a quaint town in southwestern Connecticut.
The old family friend ducked under a nearby desk and called 911, while Principal Dawn Hochsprung lunged at Lanza in an attempt to protect the more than 600 students under her watch. Hochsprung was one of the 26 people — 20 children and eight adults — that Lanza killed that day.
The unthinkable rampage ripped a barely healed scab off the national conscience, and at the heart of it is what was once a painfully uneventful community. Until Friday, Newtown was mostly known for being known for mostly nothing. Now it is known for every reason contrary to why my parents raised me and my sister there.
Proper nouns that I only knew by verbal expression — Treadwell Park, Yogananda Street, St. Rose — have been uprooted from the local lexicon and thrust into hourlong special reports, all-caps tweets and far too many mournful statuses on Facebook. Old classmates on Twitter have implored the country to let them have their boring old town back.
In Evanston, I was sprinting toward the finish line of Fall Quarter — wearily scribbling half-sentences in response to the last essay prompt on my last final — when my phone began throbbing with breaking news alerts.
After the final, I hurried out of the classroom and dug out my phone. Before I could even scan the incoming headlines, my mom texted me.
“Call me,” she wrote. “Big news in Ct.”
Over the next few hours, I exchanged awkward but understanding texts with the few friends who I still keep in touch with from Newtown. Of course, we had all spread across the country for our respective colleges years ago, but Newtown had stuck with us. Any strained conversation could be slackened by the mere mention of the ice cream shop, the fictitious monster native to the dark woods behind the Treadwell Park, the hit-or-miss trick-or-treating along Main Street every Halloween, the $2 movies at Edmond Town Hall and its Stone Age projector.
I did not personally know Lanza, although he roamed the same hallways I did while faking my check-in time on the bathroom sign-out sheet. My friends from Newtown did not personally know him, either. They say their friends have no recollection of him. Maybe that was the problem.
As I waited for the president’s first remarks on the shooting Friday afternoon, my 16-year-old sister’s name flashed on my caller ID, a rare sight given our hectic schedules. I immediately answered and heard muffled sobbing in place of her usual self-assured voice.
“I don’t know why,” she finally said.
Neither do I.
Patrick Svitek is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, email a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].
