Sadly, tragically, but no longer unbelievably, this column from my archives four years ago could – statistically – run daily in America where there have been 343 mass shootings through the first 267 days of 2026 with 323 deaths, including three children and one teacher at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon last week.
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Another school mass shooting, an all too familiar daytime nightmare in America, The Land of Milk, Honey and Guns, and my heart weeps again not only for the four victims senselessly murdered, but for all who knew them – most especially their young classmates and friends who will be haunted the rest of their lives, of this I am personally certain.
Back when tennis balls were white instead of optic yellow, instead of numerals to identify them when they strayed errantly onto an adjacent court they had one, two, three, or four blue-colored dots. Superstitiously, I always favored one-dot balls.
The summer I was 10, my superstition changed to four-dot balls – I refused to play with them. If I opened a new can that had four-dotters inside I would trade with someone, even for used balls.
You see, I had four-dot nightmares.
From childhood in The Sixties in Ohio to adulthood in Southern California in the 21st Century, these terrible dreams have followed me. A Vietnam veteran friend of mine says it is PTSD. All I know is that more than half a century later, the nightmares return from time to time, triggered by certain headlines and movie storylines.
David was one of my childhood tennis buddies. One summer day at age 10, he was kidnapped from a public court. Days later, his lifeless body was found in a remote wooden shed and I will spare you further horrific details. It was a very, very long time before I slept peacefully through the night.
David and I were not best friends. We lived across town from each other and went to different schools. But we were the same age and we both played tennis and we took group youth clinics together.
The weekend before the atrocity, we had played each other in the first round of a big tournament. Because we were in the youngest division, we were sent to an undesirable court halfway across the Ohio State University campus a long hike from the check-in table.
One moment in the match remains clear in my mind’s eye all these years later: in the second set, after I had won the first, David broke a string. Back then youth players did not routinely have a spare racket as is commonplace today.
Two older kids, waiting on-deck at courtside to play their match after we finished ours, impatiently said David would have to default. Thanks to my two older brothers teaching me to stick up for myself, I said we were allowed time to find a racket to borrow. We eventually got one at the check-in table and raced back to the distant court and resumed play and I won.
A week later, and forever since, I wished I had lost.
If I had, maybe things would have turned out differently. David, as mentioned, was abducted from a tennis court. “Maybe,” it is easy to think, “if he had won our match he wouldn’t have been motivated to go practice his serve with a bucket of balls all alone.”
All that was found on the public court where David was last seen alive was a single tennis ball. Importantly, a tennis ball with four blue dots on it.
Important because four dots, his older sister told police when David was first reported missing, was their secret code: a four-dot ball purposely left behind meant “trouble.”
In America, every day has statistically become a four-dot nightmare with the victims numbering far beyond those who are shot.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.
