Musing...

[meijhen]

Read something today that got me to thinking about something I've actually spent a good bit of time pondering in the last few years. Being a history buff, I've wondered sometimes what makes something historical (personally speaking), what defines a moment in time such that you retain the exact memory of what you were doing when you heard/saw/

Comments

[revrb]

9/11...I'd been listening to a CD on the way to work, so I didn't know anything was amiss until I walked in and folks were huddled around radios. When I was told what had happened, I was skeptical at first. "Come on, that's like something out of a Tom Clancy novel," I said. "No friggin' way."

Then the second tower was hit. I listened to the radio and tried to get through my work. Then the towers collapsed. Then the air trafffic commission banned all flights for the next week. This significantly affected my work, since ZIP disks and graphics orders were shipped by air from most of the designers. On the fly, we had to implement an FTP server system so we could receive files and try to stay on top of deadlines.

Robby and I were walking outside, and it was so strange not to hear planes going by overhead ( and remember, we weren't too far from Addison Airport ). He said to me, "Where are the planes? It's quiet. I like it." You know, it WAS rather quiet...and it WAS nice.

He'd seen images on TV at his mother's of the towers falling and people helping. At one point he built towers out of blocks, then rammed a toy airplane into them. I was stunned into silence for a moment until he started sifting through the blocks. "Are you okay? I'm gonna help. Dad, help me." Yeah, I got a little misty-eyed...

[meijhen]

So barring 9-11, is there anything else you remember as a defining event?

[revrb]

Oh. Dur. If I'd actually paid attention to the last line of that post...

When Layne Stayley of Alice In Chains was found dead in his apartment, with his gear beside him, after he'd been ingognito for a couple of weeks ( couple of YEARS, really ). I totally understood his lyrics, when he sang about his sickness, his weary heart, his frazzled mind, his entrapment by drugs and depression. It felt as if he had plucked those experiences out of MY life. I had been sober for just over a year, and my emotional and mental state was still pretty raw, when his body was discovered.

Why was it, I thought to myself, that I held on in my white-knuckle ride through the healing and all the bad shit that was still happening in my life, that I continued living ( and desperately wanted to live ) even though my heart and spirit had been crushed--and he just gave up and let the whirlwind take him down?

There but for the grace of G-d go I....

[revrb]

Yes. It was probably the most painful thing I'd gone through. But I probably wouldn't be the person I am today if it hadn't happened. ( And a big part of me wishes that it hadn't happened quite like that. )