Author Archive
Bart Campolo
Redemptive Poetry on a Night of Violence
Friday, March 18th, 2011
It is Sunday night, and I am suddenly awake at the crack of too-close gunfire. I creep to the window without turning on the light, more curious than afraid until I remember I don’t know if my daughter Miranda and her friends are home from their movie. Looking out, I see three men spread out in the backyard we share with Ric and Karen, one moving slowly past the patio furniture where we had Sabina’s 7th birthday party that afternoon, the other two crouched by the trampoline my son Roman and his football buddies slept out on last week. Strangers in our space, clearly visible in the moonlight, probably carrying guns.
My wife Marty hands me a phone, and the 911 operator keeps asking how many, what color, how old, how many shots, until I hiss at her to hurry up and send a car because they’re still out there, calling back and forth to each other, pointing at the apartments on the other side of our back fence.
A Good Story: ‘I’m Going to Kill You’
Monday, February 21st, 2011
I often tell people not to ask me for statistics because in this work all the statistics are bad. Ask me for stories instead, I say, because even in the worst of times I always have a good story. Whether it is one of my own or comes from someone else doesn’t really matter to me anymore. What matters is that it rings true. Like this one I picked up on a visit to Philadelphia last week, which was first told to psychologist Jack Kornfield by the director of a nearby rehabilitation program for violent juvenile offenders:
One 14-year-old boy in the program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.
Bed Bugs: A Modern Day Leprosy. Seriously
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
Stanley is a dirty old man, and by that I don’t just mean he talks about younger women in inappropriate ways. He smells bad, too. Really bad. On the other hand, Stanley is about as gentle a fellow as you are likely to meet here in Walnut Hills, which is why the rest of us put up with his stink, even at the dinner table. He’s our friend, after all.
After dinner the other night, we held our annual show-and-tell talent show, which is kind of a homey cross between American Idol and The Jerry Springer Show. Just after one of our teenagers proudly modeled her pregnant belly (her talents, unfortunately, do not include good judgment), I was getting ready for “Cincinnati’s loudest burp” when Karen tapped me on the shoulder. “Della says Stanley has bedbugs all over his jacket,” she whispered urgently. “What do we do now?”
