Down Isabel Street

I couldn’t sleep last night. I lay awake staring at the shadows on the ceiling and listening to sounds the night makes: the distant barking of a dog, the soft, haunting hoot of an owl, the far-off hum of a passing jetliner.

To the insomniac, these are pulses of agony, the beating of mind-clocks that tell him he will never sleep well again; though his body suffers exhaustion, his head won’t let him rest.

I’ve never been that way. I sleep lightly but well, drained by the energy it takes to keep up with a city always going somewhere and doing something, sapped by the insistent demands of the simple declarative sentence.

When, like last night, I lie awake for hours, it’s because I am so deeply troubled that I am consumed by a malaise beyond my ability to ease. I am full of clashing currents, tingling with rage and remorse, electrified by events.

I want to walk, I want to run, I want to scream. Instead, I lie there, wide-eyed and on fire, pondering the sorrow that brings me to this moment.

And I think about Stephanie Kuhen.

She stumbled into fate’s way on a street named Isabel and died on a starry Sunday night at the hands of madness.

Bullets fired for no reason and meant for no one in particular selected this soft 3-year-old in their random path and ended her life like the flick of a light switch that plunges a room into darkness.

We awoke on Monday to the horror of that news. The guns of summer had spoken once more.

*

In the rhythms of tragedy that haunt our existence, the reality of a child’s death at the hands of violence isn’t new.

Homicide is a leading killer of children under four. Two thousand are murdered each year in the United States, and an average of one a month in Southern California.

We mark their passing with fleeting horror and then fast-forward on to other matters, leaving behind a very small life whose presence will be recalled only by those who held her hand and touched her face.

Children under 4 leave no lasting impact on the world. We remember the murder of John Kennedy because he achieved. We mourn Martin Luther King, John Lennon and Malcolm X because their imprints on history are undeniable.

But who will mourn for Stephanie Kuhen?

She leaves no cosmic memory because she had no chance to succeed. We will never know to what heights she might have risen and what stars she might have touched because . . .

Because ?

We don’t know the because, and we may never know. Because cholos high on drugs were testing their courage? Because they had guns they couldn’t wait to use? Because the demands of their gang initiations required blood?

We live at a time and in a city where, when the lost meet the angry, violence ensues. We live at a time and in a city where guns abound and moments end in murder with the slightest twitch of an index finger.

We live at a time and in a city where candles are lit, marches are held, speeches are made and rewards are offered in response to the killings, but blood continues to flows at places like Isabel Street.

And children die.

*

I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about all that.

I couldn’t sleep because I have little grandchildren I love dearly, and Stephanie Kuhen reminded me of them.

I couldn’t sleep because I know other children will die under the same circumstances that took Stephanie’s life.

I couldn’t sleep because I’ve received anonymous telephone calls that say it’s the goddamn Mexicans who are doing all the killing, and the hatred in the voices of the callers, like streams of acid, sears my soul.

I couldn’t sleep because Latinos called and said it’s only because Stephanie was white that so many tears are being shed. If she were brown-skinned, there would be no rewards, no flowers strewn on Isabel Street.

There are shards of truth to all the accusations, small, gleaming bits of fact that keep reminding us of our biases and our failures.

Yes, Mexicans did the killing and, yes, there would likely be less collective grief if Stephanie’s hair was black, her eyes brown and her skin dark.

But what must ultimately prove important beyond the hateful bickering of race and ethnicity is the fact that Stephanie was a child of our village, and her death by violence diminishes us all.

We all held her hand and touched her face in the shared emotion of a life that lasted so briefly and ended so quickly.

By a standard of morality that yearns to be acknowledged, we all live on Isabel Street, and will for a very long time to come.