Historical Events & Life Changes

SOMETIMES A LOOK BACK CAN HELP WITH LOOKING FORWARD

Photo credit: NASA on Unsplash

A publication I write for featured a writing prompt recently asking what historical event is most significant in your memory and how it affected you. Interesting assignment. My life has gone on too long to choose, I think — and including recent years of the Women’s March (and other marches and tumults) quickly gets everything murky. But the prompt immediately prompted this response:

It was simply beyond belief. I think that’s why the Challenger tragedy stays so starkly in my mind. Surely there were plenty of notable others:

I was hitting tennis balls against the garage wall with my sister Mimi when our father called us in to hear FDR on the Philco radio, telling the nation that we were at war. It was December 7, 1941.

I remember Harry Truman on the train platform making a whistlestop speech after that war ended.

There were the appalling shocks of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. There were assassinations and celebrations and tragedies. Men would walk on the moon.

When the plane struck the first World Trade Center tower, it was barely dawn in San Francisco. My CNN anchor son-in-law called from New York. My husband took the call in another room, came back to bed, and said to just go back to sleep. Later, as we made coffee and turned on the TV, he explained that decision. “I knew we’d be awake for a very long time,” he said, “and I figured you would need another hour or two.”

Each of the above events shifted the world a little on its axis for the creatures who live upon it. Any of them, and countless others we’ve lived through, have shifted our perspective to some degree. Or if not, we weren’t paying attention. Paying attention is never a bad idea.

On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was driving home along the main highway of Daytona Beach, FL, having dropped my step-daughter off at her high school. En route, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched into the brilliant blue skies directly ahead and above.

Living in Daytona, as I briefly did during the 1980s, included many memorable times at Cape Canaveral. Often when there was a night launch we’d take the fishing boat down the Halifax River, drop anchor, and watch the beauty of a flight roaring into the black sky. Daytime launches were possibly less dramatic but equally beautiful.

This one I was idly watching as I drove. Suddenly, the looping white contrails seemed to disintegrate into a large puff. Smaller contrails began to appear in the sky as they fell earthward on separate paths.

It was as if the world stopped.

Like almost every other car on the road, I pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. We simply stared. I remember saying out loud, “No. Nooooo.”

I don’t remember how long I sat there. I remember tears beginning to pour down my face. I remember thinking I could not go home to an empty house, and driving instead to a coffee shop next door to the church I then attended. There was already a small group gathered around a portable TV someone had placed on the counter. There were more tears of disbelief and quiet questions without answers. The coffee was free.

Here’s what we were saying, and what I learned: Life is precious. Hug someone. Try to be kind.

Because no one knows when the contrail ends and splits, or where its spirals go.