Ten Years

I spent the drive home tonight thinking of how to talk about April 19th.

It's strange--almost impossible--to think that the Murrah Building bombing was 10 years ago. It was my first year of teaching and so I remember the day in terms of the students I had at the time.

• Thomas was a freshman. It was his birthday and he was in my first hour class that left the room for locker clean out. The noise of slamming lockers and chattering kids masked the noise of the explosion less than 5 miles away but not the ground shake.
• Justin had a fight with his mother the night before and spent the night at the 24 hour grocery where he worked. His mother worked downtown and it was 2pm before he knew she was ok. He stayed with us in the Drama room for a good part of the day. He was a Junior.
• Christina fell into a kind of depression after the bombing that I had never seen before. She missed a couple of weeks of school and lost a lot of weight.
• Crystal and Jennifer threw themselves into the second performance of our school's first-in-4-year's Spring Play. We packed the house the weekend before and decided to run one more show on Friday April 21st. No one wanted to leave their homes and we had about 15 audience members that night.
• We all watched out the window of the drama room at the normally busy street. The street my school was on was a major thoroughfare into downtown OKC. Cars crammed the street heading south out of downtown. No cars traveled north.

What seems so odd to me is that it's ten years later. I have held Cristina and Crystal's babies and attended Thomas' wedding. People their ages are my peers now but somehow kids still look the same. My students now might not remember the event ten years ago.

No ending came to mind as I drove home today. I wonder where some of these kids are today and I thought about the kids who were in my class when we heard of the 9/11 tragedy. I thought of my Algebra teacher whose class I was in when the Space Shuttle exploded. I am tied to them all in some strange way.