Parents and teenagers are walking around this week awed by the violence that destroyed the Browning family in Cockeysville - one of those events that are so shocking we all look at each other and wait for someone to make some sense of it. But there is no sense to it, and the explanation might never come.
All you are allowed to assume, based on your experience as a human being, is that a 15-year-old boy had to be deeply troubled to do such a thing, and people seem so understanding of this, already speaking of forgiveness and "poor Nicholas."
We all tend to personalize things.
We look at this event - occurring in our midst, in a suburb where violence is largely fictional, the product of movies and computer games, and among a social class we presume insulated from dysfunction - and press it against the template of our own lives. Could this happen to us? It seems preposterous.
Those of us who feel "normal" and who have families that seem "normal" and households that generally function in a "normal" way - we can't imagine the circumstances that would ever lead to a tragedy of this nature and dimension.
But, for some of us, the Browning family tragedy stirs awake powerful memories of the long, dark teenage winter - that bleak stretch of time we thought would never end, when it was one thing after another, one humiliating, confusing and depressing fight with father after another, in a house that seemed to be in a constant state of scream.
As I say, this goes for some of us - not for all of us and probably not even for most of us.
That's something I learned over time. I went to college, then into the work force and met men and women who could document wonderful lives with their parents all through high school and beyond.
I learned that warring with the old man was not a rite of passage for every American male. Many, I discovered, lived in mostly happy, loving "normal" homes, with fathers who were supportive and rational. The boys in those households kept the chips on their shoulders from becoming too large, and they saw their fathers as friends, not enemies. The fathers in these households, I learned, were not in a perpetual state of anger, not easily provoked, not given to furious outbursts.
But that's what some of us knew - in those long teenage winters that seemed as though they would go on forever.
