"When I was 16? Wow, Elly. I don't know. Life was so different back then."

I said this to my daughter, who is 16, as she sat on the living room couch, crying.

It was Monday evening, the day after the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl, but also the first day back to school following the weekend stabbing death of a student who attended Mars High School, where my daughter is a junior. Two other Mars' students had been injured in the melee.

When Elly first learned of it, she was stunned: That kind of thing happened elsewhere, maybe. Not at Mars. And not to students she'd seen in the school hallways and cafeteria.

Super Bowl Sunday, the day after the Saturday night stabbings, there had been a barrage of phone calls. Friends calling on their cells, sharing the news, searching for details, trying to make sense of something so senseless.

Then it was time for the big game, and for a while, Elly seem to forget.

We watched with friends, and both of Elly's brothers and their friends joined us for the party. When it was over, she told me how happy she was that the Steelers finally won the Super Bowl, but sad, too, because so many people affected by the tragedy couldn't enjoy the day everyone had waited so long for.

Monday was harder, despite the euphoria of the game. A brief announcement about the death of the student had been made over the PA system at school that morning. But that was all. Teachers couldn't say anything else, and students whispered among themselves.

"It was so weird," Elly told me that evening as we sat in the living room. "No one seemed to talk openly about it. When those four girls from Mars were hurt in the car accident before Christmas, that was all everyone talked about. Even the teachers. But today, people seem to avoid talking about it. I think that made it harder."

I looked at Elly, her eyes glistening with tears. So young and impressionable, I thought. Shaken by life's cruelties, even though she already knows more at 16 than I did when I was twice her age.

That's when she asked me what I was thinking. And I told her about how her life experiences are so different from mine, that I never knew anyone who had been killed that way, even today.

How was my life different, she wanted to know.

For one thing, there was

so

much less violence: in the movies, on TV, in song lyrics, even in the way we enjoy sports. Watching a football game back then, no one would ever have yelled, "Rip his face off," as we do today. And we never booed against the opposing team. It just wasn't done.

I also told her that I had not been taught to be afraid of things, except communism, and that was a remote, faceless enemy, not really part of my daily life.

When I walked three miles from my house to the swimming pool in the summertime, no one had to tell me to be careful.

I was in my 20s the first time I walked through a metal detector, something she does every day at school. And words like Mace and school shootings and psychopath were not part of my vocabulary.

What I didn't tell her was that, as a mother, I often struggled with telling her enough about our dangerous world to keep her safe, yet not so much that she would never know the joy of childhood innocence.

I also told her that I was sad for her and for all children growing up in the United States today, because the violence that pervades our society has robbed our youth of their innocence. And that is a tragedy for which we will pay for generations to come.

Linda K. Schmitmeyer is a freelance writer living in Middlesex Township. Her e-mail address is lks260@aol.com.