This past weekend, a handful of teenage boys were down on the train tracks in Montreal, either planning to tag, or checking out the grafitti spray-painted below. It was about 3 a.m. A train came barrelling through. Three of the boys, ages 17-19 were instantly killed. Two scrambled to safety.
Apparently, in the place they were hanging out, it is difficult to hear the approaching train until it's nearly right up in your face. And trains can't stop easily. Suddenly.
This tragic news made me terribly sad. And a subterranean anxiety lingers. I have two teens: a 17-year-old son who was an aquaintance of one of the lost boys (a friend of a friend), as well as a thirteen-year-old girl, who turns fourteen in less than two weeks.
When you're a seventeen-year-old guy hanging out with a group of pals on an autumn Saturday night, eve of Halloween, this mother suspects no good ideas arise after midnight.
Go home. Please.
R.I.P.
About Me
- Chez Ami
- Ami Sands Brodoff is an award-winning fiction and features writer. Her new novel, The White Space Between is the winner of the 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award. It’s a gripping mother-daughter story centering on the reverberations of the Holocaust in the present. It’s also a love song to Montreal, Ami’s adopted home city, and a love story. Ami has also published a volume of stories, Bloodknots, about families on the edge, the ties that bind people together and those that unravel without warning. Her first novel, Can You See Me?, is a powerful psychodrama portraying schizophrenia from the inside out, a disease with which a beloved family member of Ami’s struggles. She served as a Director on the Board of The Quebec Writers' Federation and frequently teaches creative writing workshops. Ami has received fellowships to Yaddo,the VCCA, as well as many others throughout the world. She grew up in New York and now makes her home in Montreal, Quebec with her husband, children, and Bernese mountain dog. Ami is at work on a new novel, Exisle. Check this blog or her website for news of upcoming events.
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