November 19th, 2023, the 45th anniversary of the day that the world changed for 10 year old me. It was 5:45 am and I was delivering the St. Paul Pioneer Press morning edition for the paper route my sisters and I cooperatively worked. The papers were delivered at the corner of Grand and Cretin Avenues and we would spend ten or so minutes rolling the papers just so, into a tight package that would survive a toss from the sidewalk onto a front step. I drew the short straw that morning so I didn't get to do the apartment buildings on Grand Avenue. I trudged off into the pale light of a chilly dawn to go house to house, hoping to get my part of the route done in time to get home and catch Saturday morning cartoons. I remember there being snow on the ground and being pretty bundled up against the cold, the canvas bag full of papers stiff against my shoulder and my nose starting to run. I hated doing the paper route on cold days, this day was no different until it was. Being ten, my worldview was pretty narrow, focused as it was on the denizens of Goodrich Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood or the daily grind of trying to navigate Catholic school as a kid with a lot of questions that weren't always welcome (I'll tell you about that one of these days). I knew there was a great big world out there and was probably better informed than most kids my age, simply through absorbing information from my parents' conversations and their political involvement throughout my entire childhood. I wasn't completely clueless about the world, but as a kid, you're pretty insulated from the bad stuff just by being a kid with your mind always being somewhere much closer to home than events across the world.
That cold November morning, as I grumped and muttered my way through my paper route, was the first time I felt horror. It was the first time I cried for people I'd never met. It was the last time I looked at the world with the idea that bad things didn't happen. It was the first time I came face to face with the horribleness of violent death. As I tossed a paper onto Shapiro's front step, the damn thing unrolled as it hit the door. Cursing in the way only a kid can, I stomped up the steps to re-roll the paper so it wouldn't blow away. Looking down at the front page, I saw the worst image I'd ever seen, one that haunts me to this day and a story that would shock the world for years to come. MASSACRE IN THE JUNGLE - 800 Feared Dead in Mass Suicide. The photo, taken from the air, showed a primitive looking village of sorts and rows upon rows of bodies. So many people laying side by side by side, everywhere the camera could capture, there were bodies. Men and women, young and old, kids and babies and dogs, all laying together like discarded playthings. I stood, frozen by the image that, nearly fifty years later, still chills me to my core. I remember sitting down on the top step and reading about the people who followed a man into the jungle. They followed him from their homes, away from their country and into a strange world they thought was going to be paradise to find nothing but squalor, back breaking labor, terror and ultimately, a horrifying night of death.
I read the article and kept revisiting that front page photo, my brain almost refusing to comprehend what it was taking in, rejecting the words and images on the page. I burst into noisy tears, sobbing in the cold, dim, early morning light and did not know, at that moment, everything changed. Mrs. Shapiro never imagined when she woke up that Saturday morning, that she would soon be presented with a weeping ten year old on her front step before she'd had her morning coffee. Alarmed, as one would be, Mrs. Shapiro immediately went into mom mode, asking if I was hurt or if someone had scared me. It was several long moments before I even realized she was standing there, wrapped in a fluffy robe and slippers, an empty cup in her hand and a look of concern on her face. It took forever for me to articulate what caused my hysterical meltdown on her front step and I'm not sure that I did much more than continue to sob and point to the newspaper. She ushered me into her kitchen and removed my hat and mittens, the heavy canvas bag lay abandoned in the front entry as she told me to sit at the table. I put my head down on her table and continued to sob as though my heart was breaking, because it well and truly was. I had heard that word, "heartbroken", before but until that moment, I didn't know what it meant to be heartbroken. Poor Mrs. Shapiro bustled around her kitchen, doing the only thing some of us can think to do in times of distress, feeding the distressed person. As I sat in the warm kitchen, trying to process the words, images and feelings that had crashed into my world so suddenly and unpleasantly, I watched Mrs. Shapiro cooking bacon and eggs and placing a cup of cocoa in front of me. The tears finally gave way to that weird, disconnected numbness that comes after a storm of emotions and exhaustion set in. I only knew Mrs. Shapiro from the paper route, trick or treating and occasional stops by as we raised money for the yearly school marathon, but here I sat at her kitchen table while she made breakfast and tried to make sense of the strange turn her weekend had taken.
After I had eaten a bit of the breakfast she so hastily cooked and drank some cocoa, Mrs. Shapiro asked if I was okay and I honestly couldn't answer. I had so many questions swirling around and they began to pour out in a torrent of words that I'm not even sure made sense. She tried so hard to console me but had no answers, she still didn't even know the details that I did, as her newspaper was still lying on the floor in her front entry. She called my mother to let her know that her third daughter was currently weeping in the Shapiro kitchen and that someone should probably come. After being assured I wasn't injured or in physical danger, my mother pulled a coat over her own robe and slippers and headed the five or six blocks to the Shapiro house. By the time my mom got there, Mrs. Shapiro had read the article that had set this emotional storm in motion and appeared on the verge of tears herself, I think she was relieved when mom got there so she could process her own thoughts and feelings without a ten year old witness.
My mother had seen the news but was unprepared to try and explain it all to me at 6:30 in the morning so we drove home quietly, her arm around my shoulders as I had scootched over to her side as soon as she got in the car. The rest of the newspapers were delivered later that morning by my dad, no one seemed too upset as the news just kept coming. I remember my parents trying to steer me away from the news coverage and to distract me from dwelling on thoughts of death.
I sometimes wonder if that story, those images and words I read that morning, changed who I became. Would I be different now if I hadn't seen that newspaper headline? I didn't become obsessed with death, I didn't spiral downward, I didn't withdraw from the world, but something did change. Ten year old me now knew that sometimes people did terrible things to each other, to themselves and to their kids. As the details of what happened in Guyana emerged, the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and four others on an isolated airstrip in the middle of the jungle, the insanity of Jim Jones and the incomprehensible actions of all those people, the world recoiled and wondered why. After that day, and the weeks that followed, I no longer worried about monsters under the bed or boogeymen in the dark because they no longer scared me, I had bigger worries now.
I suppose this is why I am a news junkie, I need to know what happened, why it happened and what happens next. Maybe this is why my first career was in radio, when things happened, I was the one with the information, I was the one with the facts and I would be the one to tell people what was going on.
We had the paper route for a couple more years after that fateful day, I made sure to never read the front page until I got home. To this day, I HATE letting anyone see me cry and I rarely cry in front of people. Mrs. Shapiro recovered from the shock of finding a neighborhood child huddled on her front steps in the throes of emotional devastation and was very sweet to me every time our paths crossed. My memories of that day are as vivid as if they happened yesterday, I remain a little morbidly fascinated by the events in Jonestown and still watch the occasional documentary about it.
I mourn the child who left the house to deliver papers that morning, ugliness and horror crashed down on her in one giant blow and she was never the same after that. I think she lost her wide eyed innocence, her belief that parents would never hurt their kids, her idea that religion was meant to save people. She became a little jaded, a little cynical and determined to protect people after that, even though she was ten and had no idea what would come next.
I carry her with me and protect her as best I can, I feed her joy on a regular basis. I give her silliness and dumb jokes and the ability to see and celebrate the absurd. I give her reassurance that the world isn't as horrible as that day and that there is so much good to be found. I give her simple pleasures like books and big ridiculous dogs, trips to the state fair and hugs from her grown up kids. She changed, her world changed but she did not drown in the horror of that day. She found meaning and an appreciation of the life she had and the life she has today.
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