The Final Chapter in a Promising Young Life

I was driving when it occurred to me that it has been 20 years since my old friend Geoff Sanders was murdered.

I was headed home from work, public radio blasting even though I really wasn’t listening, the rosy beginnings of sunset blooming over the abandoned warehouses of gritty New York Avenue, the route I take every day.

Then a piece came on the radio — I’ve tried in vain to find it since. How my memory fails me — about a mentoring program for young inner-city men set in the context of a wave of gang violence that spread across Chicago this summer.

Even if you can’t save everybody, the director was saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, it’s worth it if you just save one.