Old So What

  As of this posting there has been a shooting and killing of the United Healthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson. The person of interest is, and I will say his name, Luigi Mangione. The suspect is 26 years-old.   A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in computer science. I know this school personally, both my brothers graduated from there, and my husband did design and photographic work for several of their departments for many years. I helped with some supplemental writing for two of their publications myself. So, I can say without hesitation that murder is not the norm. Since we do not know all the facts at this point, I can only wonder what happened? And why? Why did this young man take a life and throw his own away…completely. There must have been a reason. The whole event was so tragic. It could be the plot of a movie. And, of course, eventually it will be.

  Candidate Number One Yulie and I were friends. You could even say, best friends. She would cook hamburgers for us on Saturdays when her mother wasn’t home. They were really tasty and I think it may have been the only thing that Yulie knew how to cook. There used to be an expression:   Tall, Dark (meaning dark hair), and Handsome. Well, on Saturdays when her mother wasn’t home, this man would come by with his little boy, who I always found annoying. But that’s neither here nor there (another old expression). How he knew Yulie I’ve long forgotten.   I think he had started out as a friend of the family or of her mother’s. Anyway, he was short, dark of hair and, I thought, ugly. He looked as if he ought to go for a good scrub down and bathe in an astringent. He was married, but always kidded around, touching and flirting with Yulie, and to my dismay, she flirted right back. Yulie was, what we called in the 1950’s, well developed for her age. He treated her as...