Good morning Everyone!
How many of you remember the game “telephone”? Somewhere between 2nd and 6th grade, a teacher, troop leader or other adult in charge of a group of children (because we kids would never have done something like this on our own – we had better games to play!) would have us all either stand or sit in a line. Then the leader would whisper something to the first child in the line, and that something was whispered all the way down the line to the last child, where the final result was announced. Usually the message had changed drastically by the time it reached the last person in line.
We had the Middle School version of telephone here the other day. Kayla called me after school to announce proudly “We were on soft lock down today!” Apparently, a soft lock down permits the activities of the normal school day to continue with some added locked doors and things. I asked her if it had been a drill, and she was pleased to tell me that no, the lock down was for real. She said that at one point, helicopters flying over head shook her school room.
An astute parent such as myself would realize that at this point, Kayla was eager to tell me more, so I made her day by asking about it. The version at the Middle School was that three men had escaped from prison (and she informed me that escaped prisoners were much worse than men who escaped from jail), and had been seen in one of the lower-income neighborhoods around the school. However, one of the men had only one leg and he had been captured.
Later on that evening, to help her feel better, I conducted a web search to find out the whole story. One man had escaped from the Crenshaw County jail on January 2, and someone thought they had seen him in our town walking down a road at 5 a.m. the day of the lock down. The Middle School got one thing right: he did have only one leg; the other was a prosthetic. Three prisoners had escaped from some other jail in Alabama on December 24, but all three of them had been captured quickly.
Have a great day!
Nancy
Tales from the Mom-Side 