We're all Hokies Today

On the one year anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech, and following the trend of other commemorative notes and recounts from fellow Hokies, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the events and repercussions of that day. To all the victims and your families, my thoughts and prayers will be with you always.

4/16/07.  I am sitting at my desk, enjoying a morning croissant and coffee amidst small-talk and gossip with fellow interns. My cell phone interrupts and I hurriedly grasp it from my suit jacket, embarrassed not to have silenced the tangy country ringtone before coming to work. Surprised to see the number of my mother’s old college roommate, I pick up. After calmly asking if I’m sitting down, she breaks the news - there’s been a shooting at Virginia Tech.

I admit my initial reaction was curiosity. Not too long ago, an escaped convict had run through campus, shot a university employee and caused a lockdown. In my mind, I imagined a similar and isolated situation - far from anything that would closely affect my friends or former professors. My disillusionment didn’t last long. CNN.com, Washingtonpost.com, YouTube, Facebook... my to-do list and articles I had been working on quickly fell to the background of a desktop now cluttered with a dozen internet news sources. Each time I reloaded a page, the victim count seemed to rise. Two from West Ambler Johnston, ten from Norris Hall, fifteen, twenty, twenty-two...

My coworkers discreetly glanced over before asking timidly if I had indeed transferred from Tech. I nod. Thank God you got out of there in time, they seem to agree in unison. Somewhat numb and unsure of what to think or feel, I spent lunchtime glancing at my cell phone and watching the voicemails accumulate. Distracted, I soon decided to take my boss’s offer to head home for the afternoon. Thus far relatively calm and collected, I left with a smile and a thank-you. I looked forward to taking a quick nap and catching up with old friends, hearing the story from their point of view and making sure everyone was OK.

Only one message stayed in the back of my mind. On my Facebook wall, Ali had told me that most everyone was fine.

Just pray for Stack, she asked. We haven’t heard from him yet.

Stack. The first person I met when I arrived at VT band camp, who greeted me with a high pitched squeel and a hug after finding out I, too, was a “Tone” (Hokie-talk for “baritone”). The new acquaintance who reached out and comforted me after an audition gone horribly wrong. The mentor who forced me to get outside and try the second round anyway. The jokester who kindly made fun of my wrong notes. The slightly-tempered one who became horribly upset for an entire 30-second period after I stole his sunglasses . The friend who got out of bed and crossed the drillfield simply to help me find my way after my sense of direction betrayed me on the endless campus. The listening ear who talked with me and supported my decision to transfer, wishing me good luck as he made a sad-face when I left. The crazy and loveable one-and-only who ran toward me and swept me up in his arms when I came back to visit for a football game, twirling me around and refusing to let me go as if I were the only person he had ever known. Except that I was just one of the thousands of friends Mr.Popularity had on campus, just one of the rookies who had stayed for a year in band and left. That’s just who he is - someone who had the ability to make each person he knew feel like they were the most important person on earth.

Walking home, I kept thinking back to Ali’s message. I remained positively convinced, however, that the crazy guy had simply made it his mission to save and comfort the entire 32,000 student body. He’s probably running back and forth between dorm rooms, I thought, serenading friends with his baritone or cracking a quick joke to make them smile. He’ll call soon. Once at home, I message him on AIM just incase. “I love you, Stack. When you get a moment, let us know you’re OK.” Exhausted by the images of police, wounded students, and news reports, I decided to crawl into bed, ready for the hectic events of early-afternoon to be gone and passed.

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Blurry-eyed and confused, I groggily pulled myself out of bed and re-loaded facebook for the latest updates.  No longer desperate or worried, calmer, more serene, messages had begun to fill my friend’s wall. “RIP Stack, we love you.” I remember screaming and calling my friends, half-sobbing from the hard-hitting reality of it all while trying to hold back my tears in disbelief. The rest of the evening faded into one large blur, filled with phone calls, messages, words of sympathy, and the same effort of consolation. Thank God you weren’t there.

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There’s something to be said for the old saying that God must be a Hokie. Why else would the leaves turn maroon and orange in the fall? Driving back down to VT in the following hours felt like a blessed break from Washington. I wasn’t taking a trip to the scene of a tragedy. Rather, I drove down I-66 to revisit a community that had defined and inspired me. Not ever did I think Thank God I left in time. Actually, I asked myself why I had been so insistant on leaving in the first place.

Before leaving, I had gotten back in touch with professors who had a profound impact on the first year of college. I e-mailed my Genetics professor, the mentor who had taken me under his wing exactly one year ago as the sole liberal arts major in his class. I learned that it was indeed his students who were captured on the news, staring out the glass doors of McBride Hall as the University went into lockdown. I watched Nikki Giovanni on TV as she united Blacksburg and the World with her meticulous delivery of We ARE Virginia Tech. I couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like, anyway, to take her poetry class as I would have had I not left that fall.

I met with the Tones for lunch at Ghillies, feeling at home amid Blackburg’s outdoor, vegetarian, liberal crowd. It was there I had discovered to-die-for Bahama Walnut French Toast, brunching on a sunny Saturday morning with friends over the background noise of LET’S GO HOKIES cheers echoing from the pre-game rally outdoors.

I found myself back in Dave’s office, our MV Band Director who always went by his first name, the one who had had regularly made us laugh with his lucky game-day pajama pants and kept us coming back enthusiastically to regular evening rehearsals. He took one look at me entering his office and told me to stop right there. “I’ve never hugged a Georgetown girl before!” he exclaimed, before embracing me warmly and handing me a cuddly stuffed animal for comfort. I laughed through my tears. Though I had left without saying goodbye and hadn’t written for almost a year, the man still remembered my name and the path I had chosen.

I returned to the French table that evening, comforted by the familiar dim lights, intellectual conversation and the presence of my fellow francophiles. The absence of our Thursday-night regulars was in and of itself an indication of the tragedy. Our professors who had sat and chatted with us over a good glass of red wine nearly every week for who-knows-how-many-years were home mourning the loss of one of their own.

I took an evening stroll around campus, crossing the drillfield with my friend Carl. I quietly wished I had said “hi” to that girl down my hall more often as I passed by her picture on a make-shift memorial. So often I was in a hurry. This time my steps were slow and determined, hesitant to continue and yet so desperate to reconnect with the dozens of other students who stood surrounding me, passing from one memorial to another, leaving messages, flowers, holding each other’s hands and crying tears that blended in with the evening rain. After returning emotionally exhausted to my friend Patrick’s apartment, I rinsed off my muddy VT flip-flops in the shower as he went to the kitchen to fetch a warm tea. Despite the circumstances, I slept deeply that night, feeling more secure and at-home than I had in a long while.

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That weekend I sat among fellow VT Band Members in Stack’s old Georgia high school, getting ready to brush off my Euphonium again and play for the first time in quite awhile. We must have been at least 20 Tones to have made the trip down, outnumbering by far any other section and probably producing a horribly unbalanced sound as a result. Of course Dave hadn’t turned any of us away, and afterall the imbalance didn’t matter - we knew that it would have made Stack smile.

I concentrated on our Drum Major as he fought back tears, struggling to calmly make it through the same pep songs we had played a million times before. And as hokie as it may seem, I suddenly felt like the luckiest girl in the world to have known Stack, the first to have greeted me into this community, epitomized by the brightness of his smile, the strength of his embrace, and everything he stood for and represented.

My Mom had bought me a cute gift from a road-side country store when she picked me up for vacation the year before. “What if the Hokie Pokie really IS what it’s all about?” it read.

Looking back then, I realized, I think it really is.