At the haircut place for little girls, there’s a walled-off area for us boys, like the sick-kid corral at the doctor’s office. There, Jude and I found two TV sets, and we sat down in front of them to assess the situation. One TV was hooked up to an educational video game, the kind that could only have been developed by concerned mommies with masters degrees in a board room in southern California. On the other TV was a 2nd-person-shooter; probably Halo, I’m not sure. Now, kids discern these things intuitively and so Jude knew, without any help from me, what was what and who was who. It was a foregone conclusion.

So there I was, playing Halo at Sweet and Sassy with my three-year-old.

The game was already set up as a split-screen, two-player thing, so I figured we’d go ahead and shoot-em-up family style. Now, let me disclaim for a moment. This was the last thing I wanted to do. I could see before me, first of all, my wife’s swift and righteous judgement, and then, somewhere further down the road, news headlines, all of them referring to Jude simply as “the gunman.” But put yourself in my place. Is there a man among you who would give his son a stone when he asks for bread? I had to think on my feet. Then it came to me. I could make the game something else! Something innocuous. Jude didn’t know any better. We could go exploring. And that’s just what we did. Jude was already working that complicated X-Box deal like the Last Starfighter so I came and found him and we set off on our little excursion. It was a pretty place after all. We walked under the waterfall, then down to the cliffs. Then I saw dead bodies on the ground and out of nowhere somebody opened fire on me. Jude was still perfectly safe and oblivious. I kept saying things like “Ooh, look at the flowers!” as I returned fire. But it was no use. They mowed me squarely down. The replay, and yes, there was a replay, was so bloody I actually heard a voice from the educational game next door say, “Come on, let’s go play somewhere else.” By the mercies of God, Jude didn’t see any of this and the game restarted right when I died. So we found ourselves, moments later, walking together on a wide, grassy plain. “Further up and further in,” I said.

This all unfolded to me like a fable. Life is a bloody game after all and it really is horrifying to see your own children let loose in the middle of it. It’s just like that movie, “Life Is Beautiful.” Sometimes the best you can do in the middle of the concentration camp, in the pit of Hell on Earth, is to change the rules of the game. You can love, after all. You can live for others. There’s beauty all around us, even in the darkest places. You can think about it, write about it. You can pray. Even on the slopes of Mount Doom, you can try and remember the Shire in springtime. And if worse comes to worse and the bullets start flying, maybe you can draw a little enemy fire to buy your loved ones some time before those allied tanks roll in and take us to that far, green country.