Several years ago, when Jack and I were still running our bookstore in Big Stone, the Asian restaurant a block away got robbed at gunpoint.

Red Flower Restaurant was the place everyone went when making supper was too much to manage. The “we didn’t plan on not planning” solution with cheap, filling, moderately healthy tasty food, served fast.

You don’t really pay attention to a fixture until it breaks. When Red Flower closed suddenly for a couple of days, word went around the town. A couple men entered the place, pointed a gun at the preschooler son of the owners, and told his mother the cashier that she would give them all the money on the premises, or they would shoot the kid.

So they left with all the cash, and the family took a couple of days to recover. From one small business to another, recognizing also the difficulty of running a small business as immigrants in a small town (Jack got nasty notes from people from time to time about how he should “go back to Ireland and leave the jobs to the real Americans”) I did a thing.

I took a few sheets of paper taped together, wrote in red sharpie WE STAND WITH RED FLOWER across the top, and made a bunch of signature lines on the left and comment spaces on the right. Taped it to their window and left it there.

The thing filled with sweet signatures and comments within a day. “We love you!” “You are in our thoughts and prayers” “We couldn’t do without you” and “So glad you are okay” variants soon covered the paper and people had stuck a few more sheets up.

No one was nasty. That was more than a decade ago. People hold onto their own, right, be it community members or values? At the time, I never thought about what might have happened, had someone decided to be mean to the Red Flower family. Everyone was so sorry for what happened.

Now, would I repeat that? In this weird America where allegations of racism follow a certain political party to the point of stopping all conversation, where the ability to be friends with someone depends on whether they acknowledge the rights of your other friends, where virtue signaling has become a cutthroat competitive sport, would I do that again?

I don’t know. Herein lies the rub. People are still who they were, but some feel empowered and others repressed. Given a chance, given the same situation, would people still show sweetness?

I don’t know. Would I be afraid to try that again? Probably. Does that make me smarter, older, wiser, or part of the problem? I don’t know.

Are we still nice to each other, when push comes to gunpoint and people need reassurance? I don’t know. Does the fact that I would be afraid to do that now mean something?

Yeah, it does. But what does it mean?

I don’t know.