Last Thursday night, I had a memorable conversation with my son. I mentioned that he seemed pretty excited about his plans for the evening, and he said that he had been waiting for four years for this to happen. The tickets printed and waiting in his pocket had been purchased weeks ago, and now all that was left was to get through the hours until the show started at midnight. I haven’t been excited enough about a film to stay up past 10:00pm in years, but I was happy for him as he bounced off into the night.

The next morning, I turned on the local morning news in mid-story, hoping they weren’t going to tell me it was going to be 100 degrees again that Friday. And heard the report that a masked gunman had opened fire in an AMC Theatre at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. For at least three minutes, they recounted the horror of what had gone on without revealing where this theatre was until finally – finally – they mentioned it was in a suburb of Denver. Relief flooded my system; Chicago has had a horribly violent summer but this one time, it was somewhere else. But for just a few agonizing moments, I got a taste of what those parents in Aurora are going to be dealing with for a very long time. Continue reading “The Dark Knight Rises” →