Virginia Tech

Christmas, 1979--Dad and his daughters

I recognized the building. Because I used to visit my Dad there when I was a child. Dad was an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech back in the 60s.

My sister wrote a piece about those happy days.

What right have I to mourn?

Like the rest of the nation, and particularly anyone every connected with Virginia Tech, I was speechless and unbelieving when I heard the news that on Monday, a gunman massacred 32 students and professors. As before with the coverage of 911, I have been glued to CNN, trying to understand how this could have happened, and feeling this sick, sad, emptiness inside. I’m teary-eyed but I catch myself and think, “what right do I have to mourn? WHAT am I mourning – I knew none of the victims, none of their families and friends?” Intellectually, I know that this feeling is part of a collective consciousness of pain when as a nation or a community we are faced with an unexplainable tragedy. Even so, it’s still a strange sensation.

But I realize am mourning something more than the victims – my own selfish loss, the loss of an idyllic period of my childhood.

Our family moved to Blacksburg, Virginia in 1967 so my Dad could take up a position as a professor teaching air pollution control. Our three story house was on a quiet, dead-end street just across from the Virginia Tech campus. Most of our neighbors and almost all of my parents’ friends were faculty or staff at Tech. Our next-door neighbors escaped Communist Hungary in the 1950s and the husband was an internationally renowned scientist and professor at Tech . It was his wife who first served us goulash and their daughter who first showed us an iguana. Their home was a magical place full of new discoveries, the parents like kindly extensions of our own. I learned to ride a bike in Blacksburg, and my big sister Lorrie taught me the intricacies of a public school cafeteria as well as how to play kickball.

When a new family moved into our neighborhood they almost always paved their driveway, against neighbors’ advice, only to find in winter that the gravel the rest of us had on ours was a necessity to get enough traction to drive the car up the steep grade from garage to road. It became a ritual, someone’s spring return of their driveway to gravel. Because of that gravel, the key-type roller skates we got one Christmas were useless except on the short sidewalk out front, til our parents offered the entire basement for our skating pleasure. In that basement, our Mom created decoupage boxes and our Dad happily tinkered on antique clocks and our cars. When it snowed, we not only made snow angels but ate snow ice cream from the most pristine patch our Mom could find.

In the spring we watched the cadets drill at Tech and my mom gently teased that she would invite one of the handsome ones for Sunday dinner, since my seven year old self was so taken with them. School holidays meant accompanying my Dad to Tech, reading in his office while he taught but inevitably wandering down the hall into his classroom, becoming the pet of his students. Driving through campus we learned to identify the types of smoke coming from the stacks (important to an air pollution expert!) . And on the way to nearby Christiansburg for my weekly allergy shots (reward – one nickel to be spent on candy, my choice was always SweeTarts), marveling that even in summer the nearby mountain peaks had a shining cap of snow.

There was such a sense of community in Blacksburg that even football games were fun for me - I understood nothing about the game itself but being in the stands cheering alongside my Dad, waving my orange and maroon pennant - it was a sense of belonging. Those three short years in Blacksburg were probably the happiest of my youth. Life was gentle and uncomplicated. The worst thing I can remember happening to me was having to transfer to public school in second grade, but even that could not overshadow the day-to-day contentment, the happiness, of our life in Blacksburg. To this day I am most comfortable when in the mountains, like the area surrounding Blacksburg. For many years my dream was to attend veterinary school there, but when I detoured into law, in the back of my mind I still hoped I might live there again, perhaps even in retirement.

What makes a murderer? What childhood memories must haunt them? At what point is their breakdown inevitable? And why must they destroy other futures and color those of the ones who survive?

I will never again think of Blacksburg the same way. I lost no friend or family member there, but the horror of this week will forever taint my memories. It’s a loss I can’t quantify, but I feel it just the same.

-Caroline Callison Tiffin, President of Palmetto Hope (World's Greatest Guatemalan Adoption Agency)