This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. I write this to remember that this morning,

a November morning in 2019, I was driving my daughter to school and she wanted to listen to Coast 103.5,

the light FM station on Los Angeles that plays Christmas music around the clock,

beginning earlier and

earlier every year. And as we were driving in Hollywood through a morning fog that is strange for this

kind of year, and hung with ash from some forest fire somewhere, which is the norm for this time of year.

On the radio, after Let It Snow, Ellen Kay, the super smooth, companionable DJ, came on to tell us that there had been a

shooting at a high school in Santa Clarita, about 35 miles north, that it was being treated as an

active shooter situation. That she would keep us updated, she promised through tears, and then said

something about what an odd thing it was to have to tell her audience this.

Parents, kids on their way to school, people who live in Santa Clarita, or whose grandkids do,

or people whose grandkids don't, but still.

And people who were just out driving Sparklett's delivery trucks, super shuttle vans bound for a Burbank airport.

She said what an odd thing it was to have to share this horrible news with all of us when people had turned on the station just to hear heartwarming Christmas music. And then they played O'Tanenbaum, the version from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, the saddest version. And she probably didn't plan it, L&K. It was probably pre-programmed.

But there it was.

And then there was an ad for a Honda dealership,

and then one for a personal injury attorney.

And then she was back,

her voice breaking,

talking of gurneys and stretchers and first responders at a high school,

and the senselessness of it all,

and of hugging your children extra tight tonight, and talking of her own son soon off to college, of her own nest soon to be

...