He was my favorite humor writer and my favorite writer of short stories. Besides, Thurber was from Columbus. He’d been where I had been. He’d run away from the flood that didn’t flood his family’s part of Columbus, but nearly drowned my Great Grandmother down in Franklinton. He said he talked as if there were steel wool in his mouth, just like my lawyer grandfather and my grandmother. He went to the Ohio State University, on “campus,” but he never finished because he could never pass botany. He couldn’t pass botany because he couldn’t see through a microscope, and neither can I.
James Thurber said, “Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.” And I suppose it’s true. Columbus was that weird combination of Midwestern familiarity that made it feel like a small town, with the population size that made it a real city. It’s the place where my siblings and I could grow up as members of a paranoid, insular Charismatic “community” and a perpetually nervous “traditional” Catholic homeschool group which held that gay people were dangerous predators who would poison the whole culture– all the while living a few minutes’ walk from the Short North district where actual gay people quietly lived, minding their own business and running antique shops. It’s a place where you could gossip with all of your homeschooled friends about how Muslims had no respect for any kind of authority, and then go take classes at the community college, along with actual Muslims who were very polite to the professors. It’s a place where my uncle took me for walks in the strip of trees by my grandparents’ house, between the Graceland shopping center and the strip mall, and told me that the sound of a neighbor’s dog barking was actually the barking of wild wolves– and I believed him.
I suppose Columbus is not unique after all. It’s a city, with all kinds of people in it, some good and some bad, some ignorant and some not, and as such anything is likely to happen.
Today, an attack happened, on “Campus.”
And I’m confused, and I’m scared. That doesn’t happen in Columbus. Columbus isn’t like that. Things like that happen to other people, unfortunate people, far away from here. Terrorist attacks don’t happen in Columbus. Columbus is where I grew up. It’s not a place where a man uses his car and a butcher knife to attack people and the whole school has to go on lockdown. Not on “campus.” “Campus” is where an awkward teenager like I was can sign up for theater classes and learn to read Shakespeare. “Campus” is the place you drive through to get to your aunt’s house. “Campus” is the place important enough to appear on PBS every morning; it’s the place with a weird art museum, and fossils in the walls of the geology building. It’s not the sort of place where something like this can happen.
But it did happen.
It happened on Campus. It happened somewhere I know.
My heart goes out to them. My prayers are with them.
Columbus is a city, a geographic location on a fallen world, where people live. Ohio State is a place in Columbus. As such, it’s just as Thurber said. Anything is likely to happen.
Today, it happened.
(Image of the Wexner Center for the Arts, courtesy of Pixabay)
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