Finding Omaha

One week ago today, a 19-year-old walked into a department store in Omaha, Neb., pulled an assault rifle out from under his sweatshirt, and killed nine people. That department store is less than five minutes away from my house.

I share a hometown with only one other member of the Class of 2009, and maybe 10 students in the entire college. Most people I know from the coasts have trouble even visualizing where Omaha is—I remember using a Jasper Johns painting to explain Midwest geography to my friend from the Bronx during freshman year.

We few Harvard Omahans have formed a ragtag group over the years. One of us usually circulates an e-mail toward the end of the summer, inviting all the new admits to an informal meet-and-greet—my year we barely filled the host’s kitchen table, and that’s about it for regular meetings. The whole Nebraska group joined the Oklahomans last December to watch our football teams in the playoffs, and all of us fit (with couch space to spare) in the Dunster House TV room. That game was the only time we’ve ever gathered during the term, and for the most part I’m lucky if I run into someone when neither of us is on the way to class.

My mother called me last Wednesday afternoon to tell me about the shooting before I could hear it on the news and start to worry. The store where it happened is Omaha’s version of Saks, so it’s conceivable that anyone might have been there on an afternoon close to Christmas. I even had a high school friend who worked there—not so close that I had her phone number, but close enough that I was concerned. No one knew who had been there, who had been hurt, or who had died. A horrifying afternoon faded into a tense evening.

At 9:13 p.m., an e-mail popped into my inbox from the guy whose kitchen table we had gathered around two and a half years ago. I was watching “Gossip Girl” at the time, trying to distract myself, until the local news hosts started to discuss the night’s lead story: the “massacre in Omaha.” It was one of the most bizarre feelings I’ve ever had. No one cares about Omaha—no one knows where Omaha is—and there it was, broadcast directly into my living room. The whole thing was too much.

I turned off the TV and wandered over to my computer, almost dizzy, to check my e-mail one last time before bed, and I read the message and its two replies. These were messages full of confusion and cautious optimism, but most importantly, the very simple understanding that this was what the kitchen table and the football game were all about. Some of the people I corresponded with over the following 12 hours I’d met only once, but I wouldn’t have wanted to share that nerve-shredding time, between the shots fired Wednesday afternoon and the release of the victims’ names Thursday morning, with anyone else.

As far as I know, none of us lost anyone in last Wednesday’s violence. I say as far as I know because, after I e-mailed out the list of names Thursday morning, I only heard back from one person. No longer necessary, our little group disbanded again as quickly as it had come together. Nebraska didn’t even make the playoffs this year, so it looks like I’ll have to wait until August to see the group again. But for the time being, at least, Omaha is on the map.

Jillian J. Goodman ‘09, a Crimson arts editor, is an English concentrator in Quincy House. She is currently taking a semester off and lives in New York City.