Personal

 Fiorella bad a bad day--children being slaughtered in their classroom--or anyone anywhere--upsets her--especially if she has no way to rectify the situation. One thing stood out though: Beto O'Rourke, who's running for governor, really said something when he suddenly leapt up on the stage and confronted the row of politicians who didn't seem at all interested in gun control.

Your girl has had a hard time dealing with the Uvalde massacre. Those children, those teachers, are REAL to her, just as her nephew, only three years younger than she, was real to her back when he was killed by the UT tower sniper. Husband was driving Fio toward the campus for a class when we got the news over the radio. "Paul's been hit, Paul's been hit," Fiorella  shrieked." But Paul had been more than hit--he'd been killed.

The whole family went into decline. Her husband, just a only about four years older than his nephew, was especially hard hit. The whole family went into decline--with the parents going into so much sorrow that the two younger boys were neglected--the boys knew that the whisper going around was that it was too bad it wasn't one of them, that their older brother had held such promise.

The grandparents, parents, and Fio's husband are long dead now, and your girl is the only one left to tell you what losing a child to a mass gunman did to that family.

The grandparents tried to drown their sorrows by taking an around-the-world tour, and the mother and her husband experimented with questionable entertainment. After they graduated high school, the two remaining boys, obviously broken, moved into an apartment together and frequently visited Husband and Fio.

As time went on, the younger boy developed a mental condition while the older finished a college degree (overlooked by a friend of Fio's who taught there). Later, He and his wife had a dramatic break-up up at Husband's and Fio's home, and she married again, but their boys stayed in Texas with their father who, when his own parents died, made his own world tour, then would have sunk into poverty if it weren't for his share of the remaining family fortune--which Fio distributed--twice a year.

 Don't know what happened to the third son, but Fiorella's daughter, who was attending UT by then, would see him riding his bicycle across campus from time to time.

The remaining son, the one with offspring, died this year and now Fiorella is portioning out his inheritance to his sons, both of whom have established themselves well. It's the right thing to do, and your girl is the only one left to do it. She's also the only one left who knows first hand the impact of that long-ago sniper on the whole family.

May God bless you, Uvalde. You have a long row to hoe.