We already hug our kids a little tighter

The last thing you want or need is 500 words from me about the Chardon High School shootings earlier this week. Other than having a niece and nephew who are students there and who thankfully escaped safe and sound, the whole thing really has little to do with me.

And even if it did, seriously, what do I know? I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know. I'm not going to give you any pearls of wisdom to make sense of the whole thing. I have no insights and little advice to offer.

But I will say this: What happened in Chardon on Monday morning in no way made me hug my kids any tighter or feel any more apprehensive about dropping them off for school. I'm no more worried for their safety today than I was last week.

Why? Because my approach to parenting has always been to operate at a consistent state of low-level panic. I don't show it very often (people will describe me as being "laid back"...I wish), but deep down, every day I run through a mental checklist of Things That Could Go Wrong for the Kids.

What if they get hit by a bus? What if they get into a fight? What if someone picks on them? What if they fail a test?

And yes, what if some kid brings a gun to school? That's something that crosses my mind from time to time, largely because I live in Wickliffe, Ohio. As many of you know and/or remember, we in Wickliffe dealt with our own school shooting back in 1994. A heroic custodian was killed and two staff members and a police officer were wounded, including my old 8th-grade football coach, Mr. Grimm.

I didn't have kids in the school at the time. In fact, my oldest daughter, Elissa, was only 7 months old. Every day I would take her for an afternoon walk in the stroller so that she could get some fresh air and a little shuteye, and I could get some exercise.

We generally took the same circular route, one that took us past Wickliffe Middle School. It was pretty nice for early November (an online weather almanac says the high in Cleveland that day was 57 degrees, but I seem to remember it being warmer). As we walked down Route 84 toward Lincoln Road, it suddenly seemed like sirens came from every direction all at once. Police cars, fire trucks and ambulances from  surrounding cities zoomed past, all of them turning down Lincoln toward the elementary and middle schools.

I didn't know what was happening at the time, but my first instinct as a parent was that it couldn't be good and that I should turn around and go home, so I did. When I got back to the house, I put Elissa down for a nap and turned on the TV. And there on CNN, for all the world to see, was a still photo of the middle school lobby, with glass and debris on the floor after a lone gunman had come in and shot the place up.

Like I said, I had no older kids at the time, but I was shocked. I had attended that school. I had lived in this city my entire life. There were the usual choruses of, "This is the last place you would expect something like this to happen," just as we heard over and over again about Chardon. It was terrible.

It's still terrible. It's terrible because you can't be a parent in this city and not have that memory burned somewhere into your mind. At some level of my consciousness, it's always there.

That's why I am no more on the lookout for things that could hurt my kids now than I've ever been before. When it happens that close to home, it never quite leaves you.

I hate that we live in a world like this. I hate that in addition to all of the natural worries I have as a father, there's always that incident hovering in the background, too. But it's the way things are, and it's something we deal with as parents.

As I type this, I'm wearing a red shirt and a red and black tie in what I hope is some feeble but meaningful gesture of support for the people of Chardon. Few if any of them will ever see it, and I suppose it's really more for myself than anything.

In a few weeks, things will start to return to something approaching "normal" in Chardon. People will be back in their routines. Teachers and kids will go back to classes, assemblies and school concerts. The TV people will finally leave, surfacing once a year on Feb. 27th to mark the anniversary of the shootings. And slowly but surely, as it always does, life will go on.

But I'll tell you one thing. The memory of it will never go away completely. The parents of Chardon, Ohio, will always carry it with them, and perhaps subconsciously they'll continue hugging their kids a little tighter and worrying about them a little more every day for the rest of their lives. It's just what happens. It's heartbreaking, but it's what happens.