The Tamesis
Renee Good died close to her home in the sacred time after school.
Once the last of my four children was in school, I retired from the day’s service drudgery: pouring juice and making toast, and most of all the threatening reminders of scarves and wool socks during Minnesota’s frigid weeks. This is not an ordinary coldI shouted into my teenage son’s back, Frostbite again.
When I close the front door after dropping my daughter off at preschool, I begin my best moments. I listen to audiobooks on my commute through St. Paul to Minneapolis (where I work at a university), or rely on the ritual of setting up my desk at home for meetings or writing—my pint of iced coffee, a scented candle.
These days, I begin patrolling outside the school as buses arrive and students walk through the neighborhood to class. Sometimes I work the early morning shift, and sometimes I do it during my other in-between times, the last half hour of work in the afternoon before the first kid gets the bus to take him home. The job is simple and involves a lot of standing: volunteers are there to watch and sound the alarm as a protective measure so that our neighbor’s kids and their parents don’t get kidnapped before they have their own prime time off work.
Everyone has his or her own corner. In addition to the numbers for my workplace attorney and security officer, I added the numbers for the school front desk and principal in case anything we were concerned about happened while I was on patrol.
It’s not easy for me to shift firmly into the times we are living through and give up the quiet time after getting off the bus. In Dustin Parsons’ essay “Sending Away,” a father reflects on the violence of leaving his son in school every day in an era of mass shootings. This prose poem was written as a commentary on a pistol chart. “I could no longer fear the dark halls I could not see,” Parsons wrote. “As he walked, the pavement / blew him to the door.”
Dad reflects on horrific incident at school. I’ve had this fear too, and I thought about its flip side as I watched the kids enter the school, feeling relief as the warmth of the building sucked them in from the snowy path and they were locked in where they belonged. I tell friends in other places that the situation in our Twin Cities is upside down.
I also thought a lot about Renee as I bounced on the heels of my boots and crunched into the ice piles in designated corners, trying to watch the passing cars carefully but not creepily. She could have kept driving, gone home and made herself a cup of coffee to warm up. Instead, within an hour of getting out of the car, she pulled over and rolled down her window.
For years, my wife, Anna, and I had a map of the United States on the wall next to our dining room table in Philadelphia, and our kids would roll their eyes when we would point to a place and ask the audience if they would move and go there. In the end we chose Sao Paulo.
We are not alone. “As people do across places and times, we moved to make a better life for ourselves. We chose Minnesota to be our home,” Renee’s wife, Becca Goode, wrote in a beautiful statement released shortly after Renee’s death. Minnesota’s recent population growth has been driven largely by new Americans moving to the state, but Anna and I, like Renee and Becca, are part of another emerging immigration pattern: queer and trans people seeking asylum.
