The Shoeless Principal
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 “Off and then on, Stan,” he said. “Humor is welcome, a good sign, shows resilience. A wounded part of you is like a slack muscle, one that needs training, resistance, and tone. We’ll build you up, and I’ll help you deliver excellence to your special need teens You’ll show them that you’re one talented gent. You’ll do it for them. When our talks cease today, we’ll put our shoes on, Stan. We’ll put them on and walk out of the room with confidence because your students deserve only the best.”
“Sounds like a sharp guy,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Stan said, “A rare and talented bird.”
 “Yes,” Sheila said. 
“As that trauma MD told her audience in Houston, my old school in Cambridge was never involved in any type of shooting, before that day or ever.”
“But trauma brushes against most of us,’” the MD said. “Almost no one escapes it in these harried, warped days. It’s the insanity of America’s educational system being held up to the bright light. Poor, wealthy, suburban, urban, rural, magnet, public, private, high achievers, sub-par learners, the whole deal, all of them.”
“Yes,” I said.
“My derailment as a shoeless principal still haunts me,” Stan said. “It swirls around me like a cloud of gnats, making it difficult to breathe, at times. I mean, when we do finally leave this horrific pandemic in the summer or in three more autumns, I worry about the students we’ll find treading water there. Exactly how do we test their seams without fraying the fabric?”
“An epic question.” Sheila said. “With more than one possible answer.”
“When the bottom fell out for me,” Stan said. “I decompensated, wrestling with paranoia and long crying fits. I wasn’t sure how to steady myself, and I was also having visual and auditory hallucinations.”
“Listen to this part, Ed,” Sheila said. 
“On that tragic afternoon in Cambridge,” Stan explained. “I saw mortally wounded teens and bloody clothes and heard semi-automatic gunfire echoing all around campus. It was my school, my kids, and I freaked out, seeing all the horror in front of me, although of course, in reality, there was no violence.” 
“So, you saw these kids actually bleeding?” I asked. 
“Sure,” he said. “Visual hallucinations caused by stress and no sleep for five days, and an obsession that wouldn’t ease up.”
“Christ,” I said.
“In the end, there were zero fatalities, zero guns, zero injuries. Not even a suspicious stranger on campus or a goddamned paper cut. There was a report of fireworks, two M-80’s being set off, but that was only kids having fun in the surrounding blocks around our school. To this day, there remains no rational reason for my nervous collapse, for my crack-up. Only a lazy afternoon in a leafy part of Cambridge in early June, and a whacked-out academic who hadn’t slept in five days who kept studying school shootings around the clock.”
“Why were you doing that?” I asked him.
“I felt I should be ready to handle anything,” he said. “Awful, brutal gun violence was taking place daily - Florida, Texas, inner city Chicago, Baltimore, Minnesota, Hartford, all around. I needed to be prepared - I only wanted to protect them, my kids, like they were my own. Mine, you understand now, Edward?”