Reflections from Oxford, “a sleepy American town”

Photo: Jodi Garcia’s 1992 high school graduation from Oxford High School.

By Jodi Garcia

Sun contributor

There were three things I grew up knowing about my sleepy little town of Oxford, Michigan. It was home of Brace Beemer, the radio Lone Ranger. It was once the gravel pit capital of the world, and home to Sea Ray boat manufacturing. 

My mother’s family had a long history in Oxford. My grandmother graduated from Oxford in 1918. My grand-uncle owned the barber shop in town, complete with the red and blue signature light pole outside the door. My grandfather owned a general store and gas station after serving in WWII and then went on to deliver mail in Oxford for 25 years. This is where I would grow up alongside my siblings and lifelong friends.

It was a small town, with big family names much like here, the Stachniks or the Noonans, only it was the Baldwins, the Achesons, the Pattersons. My childhood was filled with lake days and ventures in the woods. The ice cream shop after a softball win, us kids riding wildly in the back of someone’s pickup truck (that is how old I am). “Loitering” at the local party store that still operates. Field parties, football games and skipping school to swim in the abandoned gravel pits since turned lakes. I remember the first ever fast-food business erected in our town, now just an empty forgotten lot where it once stood. My most recent trip home was filled with changes, yet so much still the same. The memories at each turn and corner, revived as I drove. Almost 30 years later, this 1992 graduate still has the Oxford fight song engrained in her head.

I have been grateful for social media over the years, for the fact that I could keep in touch with classmates, friends. Most of us grew up together, if not in one of the three elementary schools at the time, by junior high and high school we were all together. I stood at commencement next to the same boy I shockingly kissed in kindergarten; alphabetically speaking, we were next to each other always. Social media became a wonderful tool to stay connected, watch each other’s children grow, cheering each other on in life.

I wasn’t prepared for the emotions on Nov. 30, when a 15-year-old student opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun his parents purchased for him, killing four fellow students and injuring seven people, including a teacher.

Scrolling social media as my classmates reported in real time that their kids made it out safely. Knowing they won’t ever feel safe again in their lives. Fully understanding the connections would come. It was a litany of check-ins, each one turning my stomach, flooding me with memories, moments tucked into my heart of these beautiful friends of my youth. With a sinking gut and a mind hazed in shock, I waited.

Then it came.

Madisyn Baldwin was the granddaughter of a classmate. 

Hana St. Juliana was the neighbor and babysitter for another friend whose child is the same age as mine.

Yet all of them, the entirety of that school, were all just versions of me in my heart. I sank into my memories, my youth, my hometown. The idiomatic ‘hits close to home’ has never been more deeply felt in my life. The tsunami of grief fueled by the sinking responsibility of how did we get here?

I am older than Columbine. I had been out of school for seven years in 1999. But my little sister was still in school and the fear was palpable. Fast forward to Sandy Hook, I clutched my baby and sobbed into the corners of dark nights, feeling the seeds of fear being planted in my soul for his future. Not only for his safety, but acknowledgement of his privilege, vowing to teach him the real truths of this world. To always look out for the littles, and to be empathetic and kind, to say something if you see something, for we know not the struggle of others.

As a military family for the last decade, we have lived coast to coast (and now home to the third coast). I remember vividly the air leaving my lungs as we drove into Connecticut, passing the exit for Sandy Hook, only an hour and half from our next duty station. As our son started his elementary years, after drop off I would often walk the perimeter of the school with the principal, who made sure the gates were closed, all the doors were locked and everyone was accounted for. Every day. He said to me that Sandy Hook hit so close to home, he was committed to keeping his kids and staff safe. Just another sleepy little town, with corn fields and cow farms surrounding the school. Much like my elementary once was.

Seeing ‘Oxford strong’ is both heartwarming and devastating. Both inspirational and enraging. Between understanding this is how we heal, but deeply knowing we should have never gotten here in the first place. My fear is that despite all the communities, teams and professionals lifting up in support, much like any loss, it will get quiet soon. That silently and slowly, like every other tragedy, we move on. Until the next Parkland. The next Columbine. The next Oxford. Not one sleepy town is immune to this. It is complex and unresolved. My grief is spinning the five stages like that old playground carousel, where you either hold on until you’re sick to your stomach or you’re thrown to the ground, dizzy and bruised. Yet you get back on, and that mean hurt kid, known as the world, spins you again.

When I first offered to write this, I wanted to share my emotional experience. But since have wondered why, and what point there would be to it. At work, in the natural conversations with patrons visiting, they ask where I am from. Now here is the heavy pause, my heart already on my sleeve, the pieces now shatter onto my apron. 

There isn’t any great epiphany. We have sent our children to war. We have instituted another round of generational trauma. We have failed our children, ALL of our children. We have normalized hoping our kids come home from school, active shooter drills as if it were a fire drill. We have individually and collectively stopped holding ourselves accountable, as parents, as adults, as members of society. We have instead climbed on our soap boxes, looking for someone to blame, looking for a solution to something that has already happened. Yelling into the wind, the digital abyss, to be heard yet too exhausted to fight. Going forward with gilded ideologies, putting a band aid on a gaping wound. Waiting for someone else to make the necessary changes.

We have spent far too much time protecting a 230-year-old idea, resisting the evolution of it. Yet a willful disregard of a similar ideology of our right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, of which has been subjected to bend (and break) to that right to bear arms.

That carousel seems to be going faster these days, filled with sadness, paralyzing us to think we either hold on or be flung off. But maybe, just maybe, we stand up and take the handle, spinning it differently going forward. Taking turns, sharing, being kind. You know, all the things we learned in school?

Today that is how I feel. Tomorrow I most likely will be flung to the ground with my anger, grief and denial. Either way, if not us, then who? And when? And how? 

Talk to your kids. 

And lock up your guns.

We’ve got work to do.

Jodi Garcia moved to Leelanau County in 1999 and recently returned after a decade of cross country adventures. She works at Trattoria Funistrada in Burdickville.