The shooting of Lawrence High School's hoop star, 18-year-old Hector Paniagua, is being reported as if the tragedy of this mayhem is that Paniagua, who had college scouts looking at him, may never play basketball again.

If only that were the worst of it…

We're predictable. Shoot up a bunch of white kids and we're all over it, like cats on milk. The people who run the media in this country are mostly white and when dead kids look like their kids, their faces are on the front page. And that's where they stay for days, while pundits and politicians ask the predictable…

Two snowstorms ago, when the trees were sealed in ice and car doors were frozen shut and car windows glazed, when everything looked as dead as Jack Nicholson at the end of  “The Shining,'' a friend said,  “If these trees bloom after all this, I am never again…

Jeannie and I used to say that even the road connects us, that it isn't just family - Jeannie is my husband's cousin - or our children or our love for one another that links us. But a ribbon of highway that runs from my door to hers, 142 miles and a straight shot - no twists and turns, just two hours and 20 minutes on a good day…

The tape they keep playing on TV in which Terri Schiavo appears to be smiling, the tape that television is so in love with, hurts to watch.

My mother was like Terri. She too was in a ``vegetative state,'' a phrase I hate because it's a lie and a condescension like ``idiot'' and ``imbecile'' - words that the medical profession used to use but gave up years ago…

Their faces aren't on the front page and their deaths didn't get national attention not just because the guy who killed them plea-bargained in lieu of a trial. But because they died in a car crash, not in a hail of bullets. Had Kevin Hurley gone on a rampage with a gun six years ago…

No one is reporting the big story. They're talking about the American flag that flew on a construction crane near the Pentagon on Sept. 11, found in a box of debris nine months later, rescued by a man who ran an auction house in Virginia, who cleaned up the flag and put it behind plexi-glass and for two years drove it around to schools…

You gotta love Oprah. She threw a surprise baby shower for 640 mothers-to-be and that shower was her show Wednesday. She flew her crew from Chicago to Kentucky, turned an Army base into a theater, dialed up some celebrity friends, enlisted the help of a few businesses and gave some young, amazing women not just a boatload of gifts for their babies. She gave them a gift, too. She honored them. She said, “Thank you'' in a big, dramatic way…

Somebody loved him enough to dress him up and scrub his face and put braids in his hair and sit him on a chair and take his picture. And someone loved him enough to give him his smile. Dontel Jeffers' smile is real. No artifice. No faking it for the camera.

So he was happy once. The proof is in the picture…

The church I grew up in was authoritarian. There were rules and the rules were to be obeyed. No questions asked. Same thing at home. A child's ``Why do I have to?'' was answered by a parents' “Because I said.”

Different world today…

I am in, of all places, a clothing store looking at shoes I can't walk in, skirts I can't fit in and pocketbooks I would never, ever carry. The pocketbooks are orange, lime, raspberry and lemon. The skirts are flowy, light, gauzy and frivolous. The shoes are pink, purple, high heeled and open toed.

And you know what? I love them all, especially the shoes…

I slip sometimes. I say Lauriat's instead of Barnes and Noble. My mother did something similar. ``It's in the icebox,'' she would say and I'd roll my eyes. She knew the word was refrigerator just as I know the right name of the bookstore. But despite my knowing…