“How does bullshit like this happen?” A second-grader asks the paramedic rushing her to the ER. (Kids are allowed to swear on days when they’ve been shot.)

“It’s all James Madison’s fault.” The first responder tells her.

“Who says it’s unconstitutional to protect ourselves against assault weapons?” The uncle of a shooting victim asks.

The newlyweds ordered the no-frills, $7500 model — two or three bedrooms depending on how you count them.

They passed on the half-bath and folded the garage into the basement. The one luxury they agreed upon was granite windowsills.

Considering Hagner’s astronomical asking price for the homes he was building, Julia’s family thought she and Ambrose were taking a terrible risk. Payments of $31.63 a month for thirty years, my word, can you imagine?

They borrowed the down payment from an aunt who would become the sixth member of the household. The interest on her loan was repaid with an armchair glued directly in front of the television set.

The property owned Ambrose and Julia as much they owned it. It exercised a veto over nice clothes, vacations, babysitters and dinners out.

Julia knew every last square inch and put it to good use. She was thrilled when the coal bin was converted into a storage room. Her one great regret was not having more closets.

They weren’t much for toys but they had an impressive collection of hand tools and, as heirs to a clay pugger and a glassworker, they knew how to use them. They once backed a fifteen-year-old Plymouth into their garage and hand-painted it green. It went faster, one of the boys noticed.

The lot was generous. Ambrose planted Julia’s beloved maples, one red and one gold, where she could contemplate them from the kitchen. There were 5 hardwoods in all. The grape arbor and apple trees provided more than enough fruit to “put up” for the winter. But the peach tree was a mistake and the ivy on the north of the house ate into the tuck-pointing.

Julia and Ambrose outlived that mortgage and spent the next seventeen years in a home they owned outright.

Today the place is owned by a couple of kids from Kentucky. It’s valued at just over $100,000.

It was a Sunday morning. The newly built interstate highway was mostly empty but the parking lots of the churches on access roads were filled.

The young man drove a hundred miles to the west to start his career. Behind him now were those student jobs serving creamy whip and fitting women’s shoes.

His father and his oldest brother worked on the railroads. They talked about pulling into towns and having to “layover” for the night. The young man assumed layovers included all kinds of makeshift accommodations and, short of bed bugs, he was game.

Except for being the youngest swinging dick in his platoon, he was just another joker in basic training. The cadre addressed everybody as “Joker.”

The kid, along with many others, had been intercepted at the Greyhound station and became the property of the United States Department of Defense. They were given haircuts and numbers.

Some of them had been drafted to serve two years. Others were Regular Army volunteers with three-year hitches. Weekend warriors faced six months of training before reporting to local units. The U.S. maintained an enormous peacetime army because the USSR had a million of its own swinging dicks threatening Eastern Europe at the time.

He and the others were placed forty to a room the size of a tennis court. They were kept flank-to-flank, snout to rump. Some of the younger bulls became skittish. But in this particular barracks during this particular rotation, the older guys managed to keep a lid on things. There was only one fight and everyone agreed that it was a disappointment.

The kid made friends. His bunkmate from “Bloody Harlan” Kentucky had gums showing dental neglect. The next bunk over held a droll draftee named Harvey who was all but blind in one eye. Uncle Sam needs you, Harvey.

A guy from Chicago named Hibbard took the kid under his wing. One day the kid remarked that Negroes loved Cadillac cars with big fins. The kid was clueless as to why Hibbard became angry. A Cadillac was a prestige car, he thought, and nobody he knew could afford that kind of chrome. Hibbard took a few days to collect himself and then came back to explain things.

Next came Flores. He and the kid became friends during artillery training. They had the same sense of humor and wanted the same things out of life.

One day the term “wetback” floated out of the kid’s mouth. It was a cute-sounding word he heard on TV. He thought the comedy character, Jose Jimenez (Bill Dana), was hilarious. Flores explained why he wasn’t amused. Like Hibbard, Flores knew the boy had just turned 18 and that he was more ignorant than anything else.

Either of the men could have taken the kid apart in a matter of minutes. But there was something there, and they had high hopes.