A few months before I turned three years old, my family left upstate New York and moved to Grand Blanc, Michigan. I started school there at Brendel Elementary. I broke my arm in Grand Blanc. I remember the swing set in the backyard and the house we lived in. I remember playing ghost baseball in the cul-de-sac with my sister. I learned how to ride my bike and to play soccer there.
We attended church in the Grand Blanc Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One ward activity held there was a roadshow of sorts. My friend Becky and I had our blonde hair curled, and we wore white frilly dresses and held huge lollipops as we sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” on the stage in the church building. It is the first memory I have of singing a memorized song on a stage. A group of us performed The Teddy Bears’ Picnic as well.
We ice skated sometimes on frozen water near the chapel in the winter time, and we attended countless hours of worship services, as well as gathered for charity work, fun activities, and Scouting.
While we lived there, my brother Dan was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and my brother Peter was run over by a car. Both times, the members of our Church lifted up and supported my family.
By my eighth birthday, we left Grand Blanc and moved to Brazil. A little over a decade later, my parents moved back to Michigan. This time they moved to the suburbs of Detroit and were about 30 minutes away from where we used to live in Grand Blanc. For about six years, my dad’s church calling as a high councilman sent him back to the Grand Blanc Ward about once a month to support them and love them.
Today, Grand Blanc has been in the international news. It has become the most recent in the list of public shootings in the US. There are a lot of unknowns regarding the tragedy still, but what we do know is that the chapel, that church building where I once learned, prayed, and sang is destroyed, and the members of that ward/congregation were under attack. Some have died. Others are injured, and all are traumatized by today’s events. Families scrambled to find each other and had to contemplate the double disaster of a church building on fire and an active shooter in the parking lot firing on those exiting the building: Hide from the gunman or flee from the fire?
My family and I are still watching the news and waiting for news from friends to learn how those we love are faring. One friend’s cousin is in the hospital. Another friend’s uncle is in the hospital. My dad’s friend is deceased.
Words feel futile right now.
Love you, Meems.
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