April 19, 1995

There are not many things I remember about 8th grade. I remember that I was really into playing trombone, and was pretty good if I may pat myself on the back. I can name my teachers, but that is not unique, I am pretty sure that I can name all my teachers from kindergarten on up. I have pictures that remind me of who my friends were throughout the year, and I had those friends who were around always. We got to go to the Omniplex one day, was that in May? I wore a skort to 8th grade graduation, but I may only remember that because of all the pictures.
Hmmmm, well April 19, 1995 has lots of details, details not related to any other day of the year.
Second Period, Coach Tanner, in the portable room outside Longfellow Junior High. He was my first teacher crush, and may I say good taste for an 8th grader. Who knows what we were learning after all it was a coach/teacher and this was not the "advanced class" with Mrs. Slinkard, they had a research paper, we didn't. An announcement was made that a bombing had happened in OKC at the federal building. We didn't get many details and being in the portable we didn't have a television hooked up. We had to pull in one of the TV carts and get it set up before learning any details.
I remember Dawna was in this class, a young lady known for drama. She immediately began hysterical crying. Before I say the next thing I want to be clear: I grew up in Checotah, OK population 3,500 on a good day in summer. Most people who raise children in Checotah do so because they were raised in Checotah. The people in my kindergarten class are for the most part the same people I graduated with 12 years later. Not a whole lot of population shifting in so people who moved in were rare. Dawna was one of those students. She had family in town, through marriage, so they moved from the OKC area to Checotah. When Dawna started crying I could not understand the problem, once she got herself under control we realized she had family members who worked in different federal agencies. And the announcement only said that there had been a bombing in a federal building.

Once Coach Tanner got a TV set up, and Dawna sent to the counselor's office, we began to see the tragedy unfold.
It was when the TV prompted people to think about the families that are in areas of OKC surrounding the blast that I realized my brother was there. He had gone to OKC for TSA state conference and who knows where the event he is participating in is located. As the details of how strong the blast was, and all the glass that had broken in buildings for blocks around, panic began to set in. In 8th grade I was so self centered I had forgotten to think about my own brother.
I now felt so bad about even starting to laugh about Dawna's immediate hysterics. Again, 8th grade provides me some excuse for my behavior.
My brother was in his hotel room, 7 miles from the explosion. To be more specific he was in the bathroom (I always thought that was funny, again 8th grader funny) and they were not sure what had happened at first. The hotel thought maybe a car had hit the building, it registered a 3 on the Richter scale so no small earthquake for Oklahoma.
I also remember the Daily Oklahoman on the anniversary providing updates of the injured children. Even as an 8th grader and 9th grader I knew that I did not want to have hundreds of surgeries to reconstruct my body, skin, and life.
Through tragedy comes hope: or something like that. It seems so senseless that things like this have to happen to bring hope, it really feels like we as human beings could extract hope from life in ways that does not require so much death, destruction, and devastation.
I don't remember the specific lesson plan Coach Tanner was going to teach that day, or and lesson plan from 8th grade in specific. I know that I learned things from my teachers, and that their well planned lesson plans provided me the building blocks for 9th grade and beyond. The one lesson I took from 8th grade is to find hope from everyday life, not to require wake up moments to remind me of hope and the joy of everyday.
Despite this I do recommend visiting this website: Interactive OKC info it has really great interactive stuff to look at and shows a lot of stuff (for lack of a better word, sorry for the vague nature of stuff). The intro is really cool to watch, and worth the 30 seconds or whatever it takes.

The Survivor Tree

I know this if really off topic from my usual I had a great run today posts, but I asked every class today if they knew what happened on this day in 1995. They know this is what I do, I ask this day in history questions. Usually someone gets it pretty fast, or at least guesses well. I gave them that it happened in my home state of Oklahoma, the date, and to some classes I mentioned it was the worst terrorist attack on US soil before 2001. Not a single class knew this. The closest was a girl who said it was the Oklahoma City shooting, I asked "Shooting?" and she busied herself doing homework. When I said "Bombing?" she gave the teenage answer, "that is what I meant." I was devastated. This is their lifetime, and although it was very early lifetime for them still in their lifetime. Devastated actually does not describe how I felt and needed an outlet, thanks for making it to the end.