When I came back to bed
I crawled back in bed right as the 6am alarm was going off but couldn’t go back to sleep until I told Tatjana about Jack Bartlett. He had been weighing so heavy on my mind that I actually saw people gathered in a procession crying about his death. I had been walking home with the dogs yesterday morning and had stopped to admire the house around the bend that has just been painted a perfect Wedgwood blue – not only has it been painted but the entire house was re-sided with Hardie board and it looks beautiful. My neighbor was standing there admiring it also as she waited for a friend to pick her up.
We were chatting and she told me the house was relatively new, maybe twenty something years old, and that Jack Bartlett and his family had lived there before he was murdered. Jack grew up in the neighborhood and moved there with his wife and they had three children. One evening he rode his bike down Harding Street to go visit his mother and two young black men approached him and told him to give them his wallet. He laughed and said, I’m on my bike, I don’t have my wallet. And they shot him.
I researched Jack’s murder because it is still unsettling even though it took place in 1992. My neighbor told me his wife moved to the Northshore after a while because she just couldn’t stand walking past the triangle where he was killed. I read the testimony from the trial and it was chilling. The two young boys were laughing as the father of three boys lay dying.
You wonder why a woman would ask me to escort her passed young black boys playing in City Park. You wonder how two young boys could come to own a gun and so cavalierly take the life of another human being. You wonder about these things and your stomach just folds in on itself and your wondering goes nowhere.
To Jack
Jack, it is spring now
in your neighborhood, and you
still are rooted here