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bktheirregularIt's strange. Sometimes when something happens, the reality is just too obvious to notice.
Coming out of the morning bar exam session, I didn't know what had happened threee hours earlier ... and then, on the Reuters ten-story-tall screen in Times Square, there was a report: "Bush Says Terrorists Likely Not Involved in Loss of Shuttle."
I was thinking, huh? How do you lose a shuttle? You lose your car keys, you lose your wallet, yeah, but a shuttle? I was wondering if maybe the Russians had looked for one of their shuttles that they never got off the ground, and it turned up missing ...
...but then my eyes hung a left to the "Zipper".
And there it was: "lost" meant gone.
You steel yourself for something bad to happen in the space program, really; the whole enterprise is so fraught with risk that it's bound to happen, and more than once, too. That's not the same as the numbing shock when it does happen.
Lemme explain.
I knew a lady in high school, one year ahead of me; we were in the orchestra together, and the pit band for various musicals. Then we reconnected when she joined up with the ambulance corps, and cemented the friendship.
She met a nice guy, got ready to settle down, got pregnant ... and got slammed by a really uber-nasty disease that rips up the lungs like cancer. Her only hope of survival was a lung transplant.
It's a long story, too long to lay out here, and way too painful, but the Friday before Superbowl 33, a close common friend came by the house ... it was unexpected, nobody from the squad paid a visit to me at home, ever ...
...I remember it as being the Friday before the Superbowl, because I missed the Superbowl that year. I buried one of the five closest friends I've ever had on Superbowl Sunday - I hadn't realized until the rabbi finished the funeral rites that her mother wanted me to be a pallbearer - and sat shiva with her family that evening.
*sigh*
I knew it would have taken a miracle for Sarah to avert that fate, but I kept hoping for the miracle. It was inevitable ... and to this day, the memories hurt like all hell.
I guess to a degree, that may be what this country is going through at the moment. Say what you will about the current view of Americans from those around the world - and there's a lot being said, I know - what those seven people were doing up there, hundreds of miles above us, was good.
No matter what we have to be proud or ashamed of right now, we could look up at the last flight of the STS Columbia and say: our people made that happen. Whatever evil Americans have done in the world, this is something we can look on with pride.
Maybe that's why it hurts so badly. For all of us.
And this comes without even seeing any of the TV coverage...
Close entry.
Coming out of the morning bar exam session, I didn't know what had happened threee hours earlier ... and then, on the Reuters ten-story-tall screen in Times Square, there was a report: "Bush Says Terrorists Likely Not Involved in Loss of Shuttle."
I was thinking, huh? How do you lose a shuttle? You lose your car keys, you lose your wallet, yeah, but a shuttle? I was wondering if maybe the Russians had looked for one of their shuttles that they never got off the ground, and it turned up missing ...
...but then my eyes hung a left to the "Zipper".
And there it was: "lost" meant gone.
You steel yourself for something bad to happen in the space program, really; the whole enterprise is so fraught with risk that it's bound to happen, and more than once, too. That's not the same as the numbing shock when it does happen.
Lemme explain.
I knew a lady in high school, one year ahead of me; we were in the orchestra together, and the pit band for various musicals. Then we reconnected when she joined up with the ambulance corps, and cemented the friendship.
She met a nice guy, got ready to settle down, got pregnant ... and got slammed by a really uber-nasty disease that rips up the lungs like cancer. Her only hope of survival was a lung transplant.
It's a long story, too long to lay out here, and way too painful, but the Friday before Superbowl 33, a close common friend came by the house ... it was unexpected, nobody from the squad paid a visit to me at home, ever ...
...I remember it as being the Friday before the Superbowl, because I missed the Superbowl that year. I buried one of the five closest friends I've ever had on Superbowl Sunday - I hadn't realized until the rabbi finished the funeral rites that her mother wanted me to be a pallbearer - and sat shiva with her family that evening.
*sigh*
I knew it would have taken a miracle for Sarah to avert that fate, but I kept hoping for the miracle. It was inevitable ... and to this day, the memories hurt like all hell.
I guess to a degree, that may be what this country is going through at the moment. Say what you will about the current view of Americans from those around the world - and there's a lot being said, I know - what those seven people were doing up there, hundreds of miles above us, was good.
No matter what we have to be proud or ashamed of right now, we could look up at the last flight of the STS Columbia and say: our people made that happen. Whatever evil Americans have done in the world, this is something we can look on with pride.
Maybe that's why it hurts so badly. For all of us.
And this comes without even seeing any of the TV coverage...
Close entry.
