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Actually, that’s a lie.  Or, rather, it’s not a lie, but my ego making a promise my soul can’t keep.  I blather a lot about what children my fellow New Yorkers can be; that we give this image of hardboiled toughness and a willingness to roll with the punches, and while that may be true when it counts (e.g the World Trade Center attacks, last summer’s blackout), when the stakes are lower we are a city of short-tempered six-year-olds, stamping our feet and shrieking when we don’t get our own way.  I say this as though I am any better than anyone else, when, really, I’m as guilty as the guy sitting in the bench across from me on the W train, splaying his legs wide as tiny women, young and old, scrunch in and give up their personal space so that this peacock display can take place.  I get impatient when I am in the checkout line at Key Food, behind some 200-year-old woman who insists that to not honor her expired-in-2001 coupon for 25 cents off the price of Nescafe would be an act of Communism, and then insists on paying her total in dimes.  I have even been known to get a little mouthy with a security guard at the Virgin Megastore who insisted on stopping Lloyd and going through his backpack while ignoring the guy who really *did* have DVD’s stashed under his jacket (the guy made it out, too).  I take people to task for shooting their mouths off and taking everything too personally, even as I shoot my own mouth off, convinced that it’s all a big bloody conspiracy against me.

So, no, I will complain again, and plenty, but not today.  Today I will give it a rest because this morning I paid a visit to I could have been a contender and read about how Billy’s daughter Steph spent her Sunday. She is shaken but unhurt (thank the fates).  Billy is understandably furious.  I am a confluence of shaky-hand, racing-heart emotions: full of fury at the thought of some bastard pulling a gun on this sweet young woman; full of impatience with her employer for only now deciding to put in closed-circuit cameras (the phrase “locking the barn doors after the horses have escaped” springs to mind); full of love and wishes for Billy and Carolyn, who faced a parent’s worst nightmare square in the face.  Most of all, I am relieved that it did not end in a much uglier, more horrible way, the stuff of our worst fears about our children.  At the same time, I am angry for that relief.  What does it say about us as a society when we have to take comfort from the notion that the worst thing that could have happened didn’t happen?