In Close-Knit Garrett Park, Tragedy Resonates -- but Unity Helps Residents Recover
Sunday, December 10, 2006
In a metropolitan area full of mobile families and new housing developments, Garrett Park stands out. My parents moved here in 1962; I'm still here, having returned after graduate school, and my daughter, now 16, went to the same school -- Garrett Park Elementary -- that educated me and my siblings. When I walk by the school, I remember my second-grade class crawling under our desks in a drill during the Cuban missile crisis.
Our family, with its three generations of Garrett Parkers, isn't unusual. People stay, or, like me, they come back. The town is beautiful -- an arboretum -- with intriguing architecture, winding streets named after romantic locations in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, a charming post office where we all pick up our mail (home delivery's unneighborly) and a town hall (a converted church) that houses our local government's monthly meetings. There's a church and a synagogue and an excellent bookstore within walking distance.
Last month's Town Council meeting was grim. Just hours before, a 12-year-old boy, Luke Carter-Schelp, was killed on Strathmore Avenue, the town's only thoroughfare. Crossing the street, he'd slipped on wet leaves and been hit by a car.
A small town such as ours, full of people who know one another in that intimate yet distant way of longtime neighbors, takes this sort of thing hard. Our long memories recall a quieter Strathmore Avenue, more like a country road than the busy rush-hour artery it's become, and our conflicted attitudes toward modernizing it (should it be widened? have traffic lights?) reflect a desire that these larger changes not have happened, or that Garrett Park be allowed to live its almost utopian life exempt from them.
Luke's death reminded us that our town is not exempt from catastrophe. We bundled together in the aftermath, visiting among ourselves, building a memorial, talking with his stunned soccer mates. For days, Luke's mother's house swarmed with people who gathered and gathered and gathered again in grief.
When he drives by Luke's memorial, my husband flashes his headlights in homage. The town paid homage to Luke's mother a couple of weeks ago when she addressed a special traffic safety meeting at the town hall. She mainly wanted to thank the town for its support. The audience responded with great applause.
The faces of the council members as they met the night of Luke's death were pale. The mayor, Carolyn Shawaker, ran the meeting half-heartedly, determined to carry on the town's business. A resident who had applied for a variance to build a porch began his presentation: "I would be happy to wait until next month for this matter. It's a difficult time for the town. If people would prefer to wait, that's fine with me." The mayor thanked him but said we'd go forward.
And we did, deliberating, as the town has for a hundred years, about whether this house or that driveway would alter the beloved character of the place; about what sort of parking and pedestrian pattern around our new restaurant would maintain our streets' cherished mood of unhurried contemplation; about how we can keep within our town both civility and a relatively easygoing attitude toward the regulations that so many municipalities find they need to keep things civil.
Amid the discussion of these venerable Garrett Park themes, I saw once more on the faces of people in that room -- people I've known most of my life -- the anguish of each person's long memories: memories of other deaths, other horrible events in our village life that this death brought back. Each person had his or her own sorrows, but each also had a shared town life, a thickly textured common plot.
Part of that plot will be the turning on, in a week or so, of all the new lights -- beautiful historic lamps -- we've lined along Strathmore Avenue. The ceremony was going to be a jubilant event for our town, and now it's dimmed. Still, we'll mark it. However sad, it's our story.
For all its anguish, this intense historical and communal depth is Garrett Park's greatest gift to its residents. In it lies the ability of a town in mourning to recover from a death in the family.
-- Margaret Soltan
Garrett Park
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