Renée Good died near her home, in the sacred hour after school drop-off.
Once the last of my four children gets to school, I exit the service grind portion of my day: the juice-pouring and toast-slathering and, most of all in these frigid Minnesota weeks, threatening reminders about scarves and wool socks. It’s not regular cold, I shout at my teenage son’s back, it’s frostbite cold again.
When I close the front door behind me after I walk my daughter to preschool, I begin the hour that feels most like mine. I listen to audiobooks on my commute across Saint Paul into Minneapolis, where I work at a university, or otherwise lean on the ritual of setting up my desk at home for meetings or for writing—my pint glass of iced coffee, a scented candle to burn.
These days, I’ve started patrolling outside a school while buses arrive and while students walk across the neighborhood to get to class. Sometimes I take a morning shift, and other times I do it during my other interstitial moment, the last half hour of work time I have before the first kid’s bus drops him back off at home in the afternoon. The job is simple, and involves a lot of standing around: volunteers are there to observe and to alert, as a protective measure so our neighbors’ kids and their parents don’t get kidnapped before they get to have their own golden post-drop off hour.
Each person takes his corner. Along with the numbers for lawyers and safety officers at my workplace, I add the numbers of school front desks and principals, in case the thing we fear happens during my patrol shift.
It wasn’t easy for me to make the firm shift into the time we’re living through, to give up that quiet time after drop-off. In the Dustin Parsons essay “Drop Off,” a father considers the violence of leaving his son at school every day in an era of mass shootings. The prose poem is written as annotations to a diagram of a handgun. “I cannot continue a fear of the dark halls I cannot see,” Parsons writes. “When he walks, the sidewalk/blows him to the doors.”
The father ruminates about the terror inside the school. I, too, have had that terror, and I think about its inverse as I watch kids enter the school, feeling relief at the way the warmth of the building sucks them in from the snowy path, and they’re locked in where they belong. We in the Twin Cities, I tell my friends from other places, are in the Upside Down.
I think a lot about Renée, too, while I bounce on my boot heels, crunching into the ice mounds on my assigned corner, trying to look carefully but not creepily at passing vehicles. She could have kept driving, could have gone home and made herself a cup of coffee to warm up. Instead, in her hour after drop-off, she pulled over her car and rolled down the window.
For years, my wife Anna and I kept a United States map pasted on the wall beside our dining room table in Philadelphia, and our kids would roll their eyes as we pointed somewhere and polled the audience about their willingness to uproot and make a go there. In the end, we chose Saint Paul.
And we’re not alone. “Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves. We chose Minnesota to make our home,” Renée’s wife, Becca Good, wrote in a beautiful statement published soon after Renée’s death. Much of Minnesota’s recent population growth is driven by new Americans moving into the state, but Anna and I, like Renée and Becca, were part of another burgeoning migration pattern: queer and trans people seeking refuge.