This is Newtown

Whenever anyone asks where I’m from, I always say “Connecticut”, and when they ask more specifically, I’ll say, “Danbury, near New York,” because you really have to know Connecticut, and know Connecticut well, to know Newtown.

Until now.

I am a freelance reality producer, single and living in Los Angeles, and I have never been more homesick than I was last night. I will be heading home next week for the holidays, but the home I return to will no longer be the peaceful hamlet where I grew up. It’s an odd disconnect, being 3,000 miles away, alone in your apartment watching news crews descend on your hometown, wincing in pain and disbelief anytime another celebrity tweets prayers, hearing the words “Newtown, Connecticut” now irrevocably associated with horrific tragedy.

This is not the Newtown I know. The descriptions reporters are grappling with only scratch the surface: a postcard-perfect town in the sleepy Connecticut hills. But even among the surrounding towns, Newtown stands out. On the outskirts of New England, Newtown is the quintessential New England town. To see this, you need only drive down Main Street, lined with saltbox houses with open shutters, holiday candles glinting in the windows. Here you’ll find the Cyrenius H. Booth library and Edmond Town Hall, both financed by town benefactress, Mary Elizabeth Hawley. Town Hall is home to a second-run movie theater where you can still catch a movie for $2–most of the town offices are actually in a separate building down the street.

But the thing that Newtown is know for is its flagpole, the giant one in the middle of Main Street, site of many minor fender benders, because at certain times of the day it’s next to impossible to make a left turn around the pole.

The flag is best seen from the overlook on Castle Hill, along with the spire of the old Meeting House, topped with a golden cock, the symbol of the town, which still has bullet holes in it from the Revolutionary War.

There are no fast few restaurants in Newtown, very few strip malls and chains. The town is sprawling suburbia, sixty square miles of tree-lined roads wending their way through woods and farmland. My parents’ house is ten minutes from the center of town, past cornfields and a dairy farm, and on occasion you have to stop to let a herd of cows cross the street. Growing up my brothers played Little League games on the fields at Fairfield Hills (site of an old state mental institution); afterward everyone would go to the Ice Cream Shop for a cone. The Ice Cream Shop is still there, still closed for the winter with the same sign in the window: “Gone Fishing”.

After class ended in middle school, we’d cross the street for My Place Pizza (though I’m still partial to Pizza Palace). Summers I lifeguarded first at Dickinson Town Park, with its giant manmade pond that the geese mistook for a real pond, pooping all along the blue concrete (one day we gave the park staff a break and picked it all up ourselves), and then at the lap pool at Treadwell, where the media are now being staged. Summers there was a carnival at St. Rose Church, and the big event was always the Labor Day parade, where you’d line the streets with lawn chairs and catch candy tossed from floats and firetrucks, and then pick up some new reads at the Library Book Sale.

I graduated high school fifteen years ago, and my classmates scattered (to places like Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, UPenn), and while I go home several times a year, it’s easy sometimes in the chaos of life to take things for granted, not to realize how idyllic and almost-perfect your childhood was, outside of the normal struggles of growing up (I had my share of middle school tormenters, but they were forgiven long ago), until that same childhood is viciously ripped from a whole new generation of children, their innocence shattered along with the peace and promise of the town.

It’s so cliche, the idea that you’d never think it would happen to you, to your town, but in a place where the slogan for years has been “It’s Nicer in Newtown”, this is unthinkable, incomprehensible, and absolutely devastating. I am not sure what the answer is, but I know that something has to be done before this same thing happens in someone else’s hometown. It’s too late for mine.