A tribute to Caprisha in the ice cream sky

September 15, 10:03 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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This is a guest post by San Francisco parent Dana Woldow.

I’ve been checking the internet every few hours to see if there are any updates in the murder of 19-year-old Caprisha Green on Potrero Hill this past weekend. Green was shot in front of her home, where she was socializing with a group of people on Saturday night. The mother of a one-year-old daughter, Green lived with her mother and siblings. There is no indication she was the intended target of the shooting, or that she was anything other than a young mother visiting with friends in front of her own home, bothering no one, when she was senselessly gunned down.

That has not stopped the rather nasty bunch who post comments regularly on the Chronicle’s sfgate website from blaming the victim. “So a female banger got blasted? So what? You play with fire you get burned,” wrote one wit.

Except she wasn’t a banger. Caprisha Green went to school with one of my kids; they were in the same 5th-grade class. She was new to the school that year, and 5th grade is probably about the hardest grade to enter as a new student and try to make friends. All of the cliques have already formed, and it can be hard for a new kid to find a place to fit in, but Caprisha was so friendly and outgoing that the girls opened up their tight little circle and let her in. She and my son went to the same middle school, where they were both jocks. Caprisha was on the basketball and softball teams, and when they graduated in 8th grade, her classmates picked her as the “best female athlete.”

And now she is dead, and strangers who never knew her are posting rude speculation about her based only on news reports with skimpy details. I didn’t know Caprisha well, but I knew her a little, and you can know her a little too, because I want to share with you a poem she wrote in 5th grade.

The Sky Is…..
By Caprisha Green

The sky moves smoothly
It’s like the wind is pushing it
It moves very slowly
The sky tastes like cold ice cream
The white is coconut
The blue is blueberry
The sky feels like a soft pillow blowing wind and spreading rain
The wind sounds like a quiet band playing jazz
The sky looks like I colored it blue and white
The sky does lots of things
It forms thunder when it’s mad and then it opens up the clouds so the sun can come out
The sky forms animals
You’re laying on the grass and you look into the sky and see a dog playing with its owner
You see people playing in the park
You can see a lot of things in the sky

There are some striking images in there – the soft pillow blowing wind and spreading rain, the wind like a quiet jazz band, laying in the grass and looking up to the sky to see people playing in the park. Nice.

A side benefit of trying to save every memento from your own children’s school days, including every poetry anthology the students produce, is that you end up preserving memories of all of their classmates too. Caprisha wouldn’t have remembered me, though; I was just one of those moms always hovering in the background, accompanying the students on field trips or setting up the class parties. That 5th-grade year at Commodore Sloat Elementary School was probably largely a blur to Caprisha anyway, what with being the new kid and all. But on her 5th-grade yearbook page, she wrote about her favorite memory of the school. It was the Halloween party; she described putting on costumes and taking pictures, going to the haunted house in the auditorium and then coming back to the classroom. “We had our party, and when we got up to get punch, we saw that there were candy worms, and a fake hand in it. And that day was one of the memories that I’ll never forget at Commodore Sloat.” She wouldn’t remember me, but I am glad that she liked my Witch’s Brew Punch.

Be at rest in that ice cream sky, Caprisha. Lay your head down on that soft pillow blowing wind, and listen to the quiet band playing jazz.