Member-only story
Over fourteen years ago, on Valentine’s Day in 2008 — a Thursday — I was sitting in a meeting with a real estate developer, as I frequently am, and my former boss. He has now been retired for about five years and is the man who hired me for the position that I remain in today and may someday retire from.
We were right in the middle of telling someone something about our city when there was a knock at the door of the conference room we were using.
Our department’s secretary, now retired for even longer than my former boss, entered the room with a worried expression.
“You need to come hear about something right now,” she told him.
My boss excused himself from the meeting, freeing me up to say what I really wanted to without sugar-coating things. I wrapped up the meeting a bit later and then returned to our department from the conference room, wondering what had been so urgent.
“Someone just went on a shooting rampage at NIU,” a colleague told me.
My boss’s wife was a professor at the college in DeKalb, formally known as Northern Illinois University.
By the time I checked with my boss, he was sitting at his desk and on the phone with his wife.
Several of us were lingering around his office and he gave us the thumbs-up…
