Sunday, April 13, 2008
Town, university welcome 'normal'
Shanna Flowers
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Except for a sticker plastered upside down, the black pole outside the door of Poor Billy's Raw Bar and Spirits in Blacksburg was pleasantly bare.
The Wachovia ATM across the street kept a steady stream of customers in cash.
Down the street, several Virginia Tech students nursed lattes at Starbucks as they hunched over laptops. Next door, Subway advertised for new workers.
The whine of heavy machinery filled the air as the equipment churned through a fenced-in construction site near the Tech Bookstore. A sign on the fence announced the store was open.
Monday afternoon on Main Street in Blacksburg was ordinary. A welcome kind of ordinary. Last spring's horror has dissipated with this spring's renewal.
A year ago on April 16, Blacksburg became the epicenter of a tragic extraordinary. Thirty-three lives cut down in a pointless and senseless massacre. The morning after the shooting, people throughout town and far beyond struggled with a gouge ripped from the college community's soul.
By last week, healing had replaced the hurt.
"If we thought about what happened last April, we'd be sad and depressed all the time," said Rosanna Brown, a junior studying apparel design and communications at Virginia Tech. "We're sad for the people lost, but we have to put our best foot forward."
Brown stood in the showcase window of boutique 310 Rosemont. She dressed the mannequins in spring fashions.
The mood and activity of a town's main drag often reflects the mood of the town itself. Blacksburg hasn't forgotten that terrible day. It never will. But it is learning to live beyond it.
Students with book bags perched on their backs walked with a purpose, not under a pall, like they did a year ago.
Sumit Dhawan and Sarin Mehta, both graduate engineering students from India, casually chatted over lunch at Subway. They arrived at Tech in August, four months after the shootings. They discovered a university on the mend.
"They were trying to bounce back in lots of ways," Dhawan, 24, said. "The security was reassuring. The people were reassuring."
The image I carry most vividly from my walk along Main Street a year ago is a huge orange and maroon bow hanging as a tribute on a black pole outside Poor Billy's. It wasn't there last Monday, but co-owner Julie Edwards planned to put another up for this week's commemoration.
Robert Ruble, co-owner of sculptured art store Xanadu, said the shooting is "not on everybody's tongues like it was before."
"Now, it's just normal," he said. For a town and its university healing from the pain of tragedy, a welcome normal.
