Grim News

…and all we can do is smile back.

I got a note from a friend of mine recently.  Josh and I go way back.  We went to college together, we drank together, we worked together.  I was fortunate enough to meet his family on multiple occasions, and we have both stood as groomsmen at each of our respective weddings.

We’re tight, in other words.

In the course of the 15 or 16 years that we have known each other, we developed little in-jokes that we could make at each other’s expense, knowing that nobody else in the world might find it funny, but we would.  Whether it was me losing my temper at a movie theater and throwing a full large coke at his feet, (or him bringing that story up at the most awkward possible time), or my making jokes about dating his little sister which would cause him to come as close to physical violence as anything else in this world. (for a doubly ironic twist, I’m twice his size… literally)  Josh has one of the most biting senses of humor that I’ve ever known, and a total lack of fear with respect to timing and audience.  He’d make a killer stand-up comic.

I tell you all of this because Josh wrote to me about a robbery in New Orleans.  A couple of punks went into a bakery and held the place up at gunpoint.   An off-duty police officer shot one of the teenagers twice in the chest while the other robber fled the scene.  As the wounded thug was falling, he started spraying bullets all over the place.  Thankfully, nobody else was hurt, but what really chilled me to the bone was reading the name of the Bakery’s owner.

Josh’s little sister.

Hillary Guttman and I have spoken maybe a dozen words to one another in all of the decade and a half that Josh and I have been friends.  However, I am extremely proud of her reaction to the botched robbery that could have very easily ended her life.  She didn’t “play the victim” or crawl into a shell out of fear. No, she kept her head high and dealt with the aftermath of a very dangerous situation with nerve and humor.

Gunshot Cookies

She patched up all of the bullet holes with little cutout hearts because she was thankful that those bullets only hit furniture and not people.

If you are ever in New Orleans and have the opportunity, stop by the Laurel Street Bakery (5433 Laurel St., 897-0576) and buy something, a muffin, a cookie, just something.  Folks like Hillary need to know that there are people in this world who admire them and are rooting for them.

As for the robbers, I can only hope that Darwin does his job on these two slowly and painfully.