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Friday, June 13, 2008
A strange feeling in a familiar neighborhood
I live a couple of streets and at least as many galaxies from the home of Thomas Willis Smith. It felt more than a little strange to drive back through my neighborhood Wednesday night.
Smith shot and wounded his wife at their home Wednesday morning. Then he drove to Guardian Care on Winstead Avenue, where he shot and killed his mother. Then he turned the gun on himself. He died later that day at Pitt Memorial Hospital.
Whatever demons drove Smith to this tragic series of events aren’t readily apparent in Rocky Mount suburbia. Kids ride bikes around the cul-de-sacs where I live. Folks walk and wave and ask about my wife’s flower garden.
I’m probably not the only person in the neighborhood who has made a detour since Wednesday, just to roll by Smith’s house and wonder at the madness of it all. Not that there are any answers on the quiet street where he lived.
That’s a paradox, I guess, of pretty neighborhoods in the 21st century. People move in and out all the time. As friendly as everyone is, I know by name just a handful of folks who live on my street, and most of those friendships go back 10 years or more.
We lock ourselves in, watch a hundred channels of television, cruise the Internet and disengage with the world outside our doors in just about every way imaginable. When a tragedy as awful as Smith’s occurs, it’s reason for some of us to burrow that much further into our cocoons.
I can’t suggest that neighborhood block parties or other get-togethers would have made a bit of difference in the Smith case. For all I know, he might have been one of the friendliest guys around anyway.
But it’s strange now to walk through streets as familiar as mine and feel something as foreign and as unwanted as a guy who flips out and shoots two loved ones and then himself.
That just doesn’t feel like my neighborhood. At all.
