TRAGEDY REKINDLES SAFETY DEBATE
by Diana Tang
Observer reporter
A tragic accident on Quarry Road in the Franklin Grove neighborhood has revived an old debate about pedestrian safety along that busy thoroughfare.
On July 31, Humphrey T. Danker was struck by a car when he darted into traffic while walking home from a nearby park with his teenage babysitter. Humphrey, who was five years old, died shortly afterward. The driver of the car that hit Humphrey, Eugene Guzman, has not been cited for a motor vehicle violation or charged with a crime. Police are still investigating the cause of the accident.
“A tragedy along this stretch of road was bound to happen,” said Doris Raskin, who lives near the site of the accident. “No streetlights or stoplights. No sidewalk. And the only crosswalk is a long hike from here.” The accident occurred near the intersection of Quarry Road and Franklin Avenue, a street that leads into the residential area. The closest crosswalk is three-quarters of a mile away at Quarry and Vance Street, but, as Raskin also pointed out, even that crosswalk lacks a crossing signal.
Area residents have been advocating for improvements to Quarry Road for years, according to another neighbor, Donald Stashower. Stashower was on the scene of last week’s accident.
“We almost had tragedy on top of tragedy here,” he said. “There was a group of children ready to surge into the street at the intersection of Quarry and Franklin. I had to tell them to stay on the side of the road. Kids don’t think anything can happen to them. We need a sidewalk so people can be safe when walking along Quarry Road. A line painted on the side of the road just isn’t cutting it.”
The accident is also causing some neighbors, as well as people who live elsewhere, to think about how prepared teenagers are to work as caregivers for active young children. The Red Cross offers classes to train middle school and high school students to work as babysitters.
“Our courses emphasize safety,” said Chloe Greely, local spokesperson for the organization. “They’re free and a great idea for any young person who wants to babysit.”
Another neighbor, who asked that her name be withheld, said, “I’m not saying teenagers shouldn’t babysit. But they should be prepared to react when things get out of hand.”
Britney Schaeffer, 14, is a graduate of the Red Cross babysitting program. “It taught me a lot,” said the rising Western High School freshman. “I learned basic life-saving skills, but also things about how little kids behave and how you have to expect the unexpected.”
Humphrey Danker’s babysitter had not taken the Red Cross classes.
My phone buzzes; a text from Becca.
How r u?
A-OK.
I’m fine.
R u seeing the shrink?
Yes. Kind of a waste. But not awful.
Bonne idee. I’m glad you are.
You think I’m crazy?
No! I think it must be really hard for you. You went through a traumatic experience. So it’s good to talk about it.
I suppose so.
Maybe you’ll also talk about that other problem?
I don’t respond. She tries again.
That problem that shall not be named?
Oh, that.
The problem that, if I did not have it, I would have had the courage it takes to be a CIT. That problem that, if I did not have it, I would have been at camp this summer, Humphrey would have had a different babysitter, and he would not be in the newspaper.
When I was thirteen, I had a Bat Mitzvah, just like most of my Jewish friends. Becca and I shared the Bat Mitzvah, even though her birthday is months earlier than mine. Most kids had shared Bat Mitzvahs and Bar Mitzvahs, because there were so many of us, and not enough Saturday mornings for us to all have singles.
There I was, up on the bimah—the stage—of our synagogue. I had already led the congregation in a few prayers, and just finished a responsive reading. (I say a line/you say a line/I say a line/you say a line, etc.) It was time for the highlight of the morning, in which I would chant from the Torah in Hebrew and then give a little speech sharing my wisdom about the meaning of what I just chanted. As I stepped up to the table on which the Torah lay, rolled open to the section I was to read, it happened.
“It” was not, I am sorry to say, a powerful and uplifting spiritual experience. It was, absolutely, a powerful experience. But it was more crushing than uplifting. As for spiritual, I suppose if by “spiritual” we also mean the Jewish concept of a dybbuk, a spirit that enters your body and controls it and is altogether terrifying, then sure, it was spiritual. I was hit by a huge wave, and it knocked me over, sweeping away my voice, my ability to think, to fully control my hands and feet. It felt absolutely lethal. You could call it panic. I think that’s too gentle a word.
I did manage to remain standing, in a frozen sort of way. And when the rabbi pointed to the section I was to chant, I did manage to open my mouth. Some words came out. They were Hebrew words, and they were from my Torah portion, but I stumbled on the ones I said, and totally skipped others. I didn’t chant them in the special way I’d been practicing for an entire year. Nor did I say them in a manner that allowed anyone beyond the first two rows of seats to hear them. In short, I totally blew my Bat Mitzvah.
And I wasn’t finished. After the Torah reading, it was time for my speech, which I’d also been working on for nearly a year. I was proud of the insights I’d come up with about my Torah portion, which is the part in the Bible where Jacob knows he’s dying and he gives this kind of awkward blessing to his son Joseph’s two sons. But the wave was way too strong for me, and it swept me off the stage and down the short hallway that connects to the rabbi’s study, where I tumbled into a chair and hyperventilated.
My mother soon appeared. I told her I couldn’t give my speech. At first she told me I could, but then she took in what a complete wreck I was—shaking and sweating—and she gave it up. After a while I decided that I could make it back out there, but only if I didn’t have to sit up on the bimah, and only if I didn’t have to utter another word, which is not how Bat Mitzvahs are conducted.
Meanwhile, Becca had carried on. She chanted her part of the Torah and she gave her speech. When I came slinking back in and took a seat in the front row, she caught my eye from her place at the Torah table. She was reading something in Hebrew, but here’s what I heard: “Quelle horreur!”
My mother told everyone that I’d gotten sick. I miraculously recovered in time for my little luncheon party an hour later and for Becca’s party that night. In response to the inevitable questions, I rolled my eyes, looked embarrassed, and said something about never eating soft-boiled eggs again. I did tell Becca what really happened. And she really did say: “Quelle horreur!”
And so, for two years now, I have been unable to get up in front of people and speak. Yes, I know, other people get panic attacks, too. But I can’t believe it’s all that many people, because if it were, this country would come to a grinding halt. You cannot know the thumping terror of it, the total loss of control, the willingness to just die rather than keep going through it, unless you’ve lived through it.
My mother has tried to get me to see a therapist about this. I’ve refused. Just as I’ve refused to risk re-creating the experience: I will not give a presentation in class, no matter what this means for my grade. I will not raise my hand to be called on in class. That I have tried. Here’s what happens. The seconds after I stick my hand in the air, and before the teacher calls on me, turn into an eternity. During that eternity, my heart beats uncontrollably, my mouth goes into lockdown, my throat closes up—and I pull my hand back to my side. It is not worth it. Weirdly, though, if a teacher ambushes me—that is, if I am called on without having volunteered myself—I can get the words out. It must be the surprise and spontaneity of it. There’s no time for the wave to build.
“Being a CIT would be the perfect baby step,” Becca said last winter when we talked about going back to camp. “Because you only have to be ‘on’ in front of little kids who are going to love you no matter what. No pressure.”
But it’s not about pressure. Pressure is beside the point. It really is like being possessed. And it really is a problem with no name, as Becca says in her text. You have to call it something, so people use words like stage fright, panic attack, social phobia—none of which really covers it. You might as well call it a dybbuk.
So:
No, I don’t expect to be talking about that
particular problem.
What about following your dream?
My dream. That would be my half-formed idea of going to law school—so far into the future you can’t even see it from here—and then becoming a lawyer who takes cases for people who have been discriminated against. Or who have been treated unfairly by big and powerful interests. Those important, public interest cases, like Erin Brockovich did in the movie. In the movie and in real life, I should say, since she was real.
Maybe I’ll be the type of lawyer who doesn’t argue cases in court.
Stubborn.
Hey, EB didn’t speak in court.
Right. She wasn’t the lawyer. But don’t you want to be her boss?
To be honest, I’m really not thinking about my future as a lawyer right now. To be more honest, I’m never thinking of my future as a lawyer or anything else as much as Becca is. She has direction and drive. She wants to be a journalist. She wants to end up as a columnist and commentator. So she’s already working on her plan. I think the two of us halfway just made up the idea that I want to be a lawyer, so that I wouldn’t be left completely in the dust of her ambition.
I did have the fleeting fantasy, when I got the babysitting job with the Dankers, that Mr. Danker and I would have the chance to talk about being a lawyer, that he would see something in me that would cause him to encourage me, that he would invite me to the Supreme Court to watch him argue a case on one of my days off. I later learned that the Supreme Court doesn’t hear cases during the summer months. And, of course, Mr. Danker saw nothing in me at all, except a nonentity that he occasionally called Young Lady.
Becca seems to give up, for now, on getting my commitment to the goal of becoming Erin Brockovich’s boss.
What else r u doing?
Reading an article about how everyone but me takes the Red Cross babysitting class. So they will expect the unexpected and not let little kids run into streets.
Who says?
Some girl in the Observer.
???
An article about the accident.
No not really. Although I was interviewed. The reporter asked a lot of questions. But I guess I gave the wrong answers because the only thing the article says about me is that I didn’t take the R.C. course.
You told her that?
Afraid so.
Everyone does *not* take classes. I haven’t.
They’re free. Maybe you should.
Anyway, I meant what are you doing in general, not this minute.
What I’m doing is trying to figure out what I’m doing.
Je comprends.
And are you teaching the kids French?
Ha. Sure. In our arts and crafts class.
Why not? Monet. Manet. Cezanne.
Ha again. Arts and crafts. Not art history. Plus these kids are 7.
Eager young minds. They’ll love your French expletives.
ZUT ALORS!
SACRE BLEU!
I mean ZUT ALORS I have to go.
OK bye.
You still haven’t told me how you are.
To be continued.
I scroll up to the top of our text string. And then farther up, where I wrote “He was such a great kid” after Becca had already put her phone away.
I wish she had asked me about Humphrey. I wish anybody would ask me about Humphrey. Not about me. Not about my emotional state. Not, Ms. Diana Tang, cub reporter, about the sickening sequence of events that everyone in Franklin Grove just calls The Tragedy. Ask me about Humphrey T. Danker, the highly interesting little person I hung out with this summer.