Laundry Days

Every Wednesday during the fall of 2017, the kindergarteners of Irene Reither Elementary wear matching shirts, thrown like jerseys over their school-day clothes. Thick cotton T-shirts dyed robin's egg blue, with the chalk-drawing outline of children filing onto a school bus printed on the front and the words "Class of 2030" bannered in raised letters across their chests. Over the school year, I come to know these shirts well. Once a week, I haul them home from my daughter's classroom in a Rubbermaid tub and extract each uniform from the crumpled mass, shaking fabric, smoothing hems, turning sleeves right-side-out. Sometimes my daughter helps, dragging a stool over to the washing machine so she can drop the shirts, one by one, into its cavernous belly. On tiptoes we watch as water fills the drum, washing the shirts clean of playground dust and lunchtime spills. But first, she makes me read the names printed in permanent marker across each tag. Madison. Alexa. Carson. Jonah. With every name she offers a story, a joke, some small glimpse into her school-day world.

As winter takes hold it becomes our ritual, this hauling home, this washing and drying and folding and returning like new. Eventually, I begin to recognize the printed names and can match each one to a face, to a gap-toothed lisp or a lopsided grin. They will grow up together, these children. Book fairs and school carnivals will turn into homecoming games, SAT prep, senior prom. Days will become years will become a generation, and one day we will ask ourselves: remember when? Sometimes, as I hand the tub of freshly washed shirts to my daughter's teacher—herself so blond and young and bright—I take one last look inside the classroom. Twenty-two pairs of feet in Velcro tennis shoes crisscross applesauce on a rainbow carpet. Twenty-two pairs of hands fidget and poke. The room smells of soap and dry-erase markers and Elmer's glue. Breathing deeply, I whisper to myself—maybe these children are the beginning, the green shoots that will someday root us all to solid earth.

They were toddlers, this class of 2030, when a lone gunman across the country in Newtown, Connecticut, shook every sense of what we thought we knew. About suburban safety, about the march of time and the measure by which we parents gauge our fears. Of course, we had seen bloodshed in classrooms before, too many times to count—but Sandy Hook shook us to our core. "An elementary school?" we cried, as though the age of the children gunned down made their deaths even less palatable. But somehow it did. The freckled cheeks and trusting smiles memorialized on the cover of Time magazine moved us as nothing else had. "Enough is enough," we said, a collective wail. We organized committees and lobbied our senators. We listened as experts outlined psychological profiles of the killer. We: new parents to this newly vulnerable generation. If only they could tell us why, we thought, as we looked around at the young men in our own lives. If only we knew, maybe then we could make it stop. We signed petitions. We made promises. We listened to the old refrains: assault weapons ban, gun show loophole, universal background checks. As terror settled deep in our bones, we performed the rituals that over the years we had come to depend on. Count our dead, lobby our senators, follow the money, beg for a cure. Soil and cleanse and repeat. What else could we do? These rituals, however futile, were the only solace we had left. But at least we knew them by heart.

Remember: we were the ones who started it all.

________

I was a senior in high school the year Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Columbine became household names. Nineteen ninety-nine. That school year began like any other. As fall turned to winter turned to spring, we ridiculed Monica Lewinsky and demonized Jack Kevorkian and cried for Matthew Shepherd. With our baggy jeans and studded belts and crushed-velvet chokers, we danced to...