Running From Gunshots at the Cathedral With My Son

We almost didn’t go. I’d put the outdoor concert on our calendar, but as Sunday unfurled and some work I had to do relentlessly stared me down and inertia took hold of our family, I announced, “If no one REALLY wants to go to the concert, we’re going to skip it.”

I felt bad about this: Living in Manhattan through the pandemic has left me constantly searching for safe things to do with our kids, to remind us how special it still is to live in this city. My 8-year-old son motivated me. “I want to go, Mom, if that’s OK?” he said as he slipped on his sneakers.

My husband, exhausted on the sofa, and my daughter, flopped somewhere near him with Legos in hand, waved goodbye.

When the taxi turned onto West 112th Street, I gasped a bit at the grandeur and beauty of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and reminded my son that we’d first visited the church when he was 4 years old, and we saw a peacock named Phil walking the grounds.

The concert had already begun as we took a spot on the corner of 112th and Amsterdam. Each member of the choir — surprisingly few people making astonishingly gorgeous noise — was spaced more than six feet apart over several steps in front of the cathedral. Their sound was unearthly. Hundreds of us stood, enraptured. I felt so strongly and with such gratitude that we were part of a community — everyone was masked and socially distant, but we were together in this moment, listening to Latin verses gloriously ascend. My boy stood in front of me, and I ran my fingers through his very long pandemic hair. I whispered through my mask into his ear, “I’m so glad we did this. Thank you for wanting to come.”

I took a video of the choir and the crowd, panning up the church’s western facade. “How to be a New Yorker at Christmas time,” I posted on Twitter. A celebration of the moment. A sharing of holiday spirit. A brag about being a New Yorker.

After the concert ended, the front steps largely cleared, and folks milled about. We were planning to get a slice of Dobos torte at a nearby pastry shop when a gunshot split the air. Birds scattered off the steps in a violent rush. I didn’t realize it was a shot at first, though — who’s ever expecting to hear gunfire? My absurd thought in that millisecond was this: Yo, St. John, what a jarring way to remove birds from your entrance! Then another shot was fired and another, so loud my body contracted — I’ve only ever heard guns in movies — and we saw the gunman shooting into the air.

“What’s happening?” my son asked, wide-eyed. “Someone’s shooting — RUN!” I ordered, and we joined the sprinting surge of terrified people. Before I turned away from the cathedral, I saw a couple hit the ground near the steps. I prayed my child hadn’t seen.

My son lost his shoe. I ran back upstream, grabbed it from a man who handed it to me like a baton in a race, and we kept running, shots firing behind us. This is a shooting. This is real.

I got us into a taxi and turned to my boy, a kid who is usually excruciatingly verbal, now silent. He stared straight ahead. “I don’t feel safe,” he said quietly. “Now I think anyone could have a gun.”

I told him he was safe now. When we got out of the cab, I got on my knees on Broadway, in front of our building, to hug him. Then I realized I was kneeling in front of a line of New Yorkers waiting to get Covid tests at a CityMD and hustled us home.

He sat on my husband’s lap, and we talked to him about how the officers did their job. At that point — thanks to the miracle/curse of instant social media — we could assure him that no one was hurt except the shooter. We leaned into how the police are taking care of the community rather than the lie that bad things don’t happen.

I’m shaken, but fine. My son seems to be OK, too (although we’re keeping an eye on him). I’ve felt the need to investigate my subdued reaction, though, because it feels incommensurate with the concern coming my way. Scores of friends and kind strangers on social media who know we experienced a shooting keep checking on us. They use words like “trauma” and say they’re praying for us.

If you’d told me a year ago that this Christmas, not only would I not be taking my kids to see a live performance of “The Nutcracker” (ha!), but that we would be in the midst of a pandemic in a city where almost 25,000 people have died of a disease that has kept us on chronic lockdown; if you’d told me that I would grab my little boy’s hand to sprint away from an active shooter, I couldn’t have absorbed that information.

But after a year that’s exceeded the bounds of the imagination, my brain is rewired. My mind now goes to: It could be so much worse.

Because if 2020 has given me anything, it’s perspective. It’s plummeted my expectations. I mean, the last time I attended a Christmas concert at St. John the Divine, it was inside, candlelit and cozy despite the expanse, hundreds of us side by side to listen to Sting. This year the opportunity to just stand on a corner for 20 minutes, in a mask, holding my kid, moved me to tears.