when it changed
I know exactly where I was twelve years ago yesterday. Alone, on the dead-end branch of the third floor hall, I had my feet tucked under me and my thoughts fixed on lines of orange letters flickering across a screen that, if I saw it now, would seem ludicrously small. If there was an internet, I didn’t know about it, and, undistracted, I revised and reconsidered and revised again. The phone rang and someone asked if I’d heard the news. When I said I hadn’t, he told me. And since then, when the incomprehensible happens, the way it did this week, I feel as if I’d been expecting it all along.
4 comments:
On that awful day, I was working the front desk of a hotel in Tucson, Arizona. A child of about 10, who had been eating breakfast in the atrium, watching CNN, came running up to me, tears streaming down his face, completely hysterical.
"My mom!" he wailed, "MY mom!" He dragged me into the atrium so I could see what the hell he was talking about, expecting to see his mother in some kind of distress. Instead he was pointing to the TV, the smoking remains of the Murrah building.
Still crying, he said, "they said the federal building got blowed up. The federal building got blowed up."
I stared in horror at the screen, then I asked the boy if he was sure he mom was in Oklahoma City. He said, 'no, she's working at the federal building here in Tucson."
Oh. His mother was a federal agent. She was in Tucson for a week for god only knows what. Together he and I called his mom's cell phone (a luxury at that time) and she assured him she hadn't been blown up. She came to the hotel right away. (I have always wondered what the hell she was thinking, leaving her 10 year old alone at a hotel while she went to work.)
I was surpised and shocked then, in '95. I'm not surprised anymore...Sad, but not surprised.
Gretchen
Yeah. That's right. Nothing is surprising anymore, just sad.
I was working at a pizza restaurant that morning, they had all the sets on CNN. Everyone was making wild accusations about Middle East terrorists, but Clinton reminded us to withhold judgement, and that we did not actually know who did it, but that we would find out.
I miss a voice of reason.
Unfortunately these horrific situations aren't just not surprising, but almost expected.
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