| Subject: April 19, 1995 |
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S
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Date Posted: 18:21:12 12/29/01 Sat
There were a lot of things going on in my life at that time, and I'm not sure where to start and stop in telling about what this day was like in Stillwater, Oklahoma. So maybe I'll just start with that morning and see how it goes.
I was getting ready to go to class. I had overslept, and I had a toothbrush in my mouth as I sat on the edge of the bed pulling on my socks. The television was on, but I wasn't paying much attention. At first, I didn't think much about it when the anchor person stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. I looked up as he said, "Something just shook the studio. Get somebody out there to find out what that was."
My first thought was an explosion at an oil refinery. My second thought was an earthquake. They claimed we had small earthquakes from time to time in Oklahoma, but if we did, I never knew it.
After a minute or so had gone by with virtually all activity ground to a halt on the morning newscast, the anchor said, "They're telling us there is smoke coming from downtown. We'll get a chopper up to see if we can find out anything else."
A few more minutes went by before we had audio from the helicopter. They said the smoke appeared to be coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the federal building.
They got the video feed up just as the helicopter began to approach the federal building. It was moving toward the side that was still standing. But we knew something we terribly wrong because smoke was billowing up from the other side of the building. The helicopter began to make a slow circle so that little by little, inch by inch, we could see that half the Murrah building was gone. All this time we had the picture and no sound. Everyone at the TV station had fallen into a dead, stunned silence.
The first thing anyone said just as the helicopter reached the point of giving us a full view of the damage was "I hope nobody died." It was 9:00 in the morning on a weekday. One half of a busy building was gone, and all anyone could think to say was "I hope nobody died."
That line goes through my head every time I see the pictures from the trade center.
Only a week before this bombing I had been in Perry, Oklahoma at a little country diner with a man I'd been involved with for four years. He was telling me that he was leaving Oklahoma (without me). I remember that we talked about what a great town Perry was. Children were walking home from school while we drank coffee and talked. The town seemed to be untouched by the fears and worries of the outside world. It looked like the kind of place you could go to escape most anything, which, I think, was why we were there.
Perry, Oklahoma is the town where they found Timothy McVeigh. The court house they showed McVeigh being taken away was the same spot I'd been looking at when I said I thought it was great that people didn't worry about their children in that town.
The rest is chaos. I'm not sure I can sort it out in an order that makes sense. So many people around me were hurt first hand, second hand, third hand and on down the line that I don't even know where to start.
Some of the most chilling stories, though, I got the next year when I had students who'd been in OKC high schools the day of the bombing. One guy described sitting in school as names were called over the intercom. The school was getting so many calls, that they just announced over the loud speakers when someone's parent had called to say they were safe. It was the only way they could get the messages to the students and still have time to answer the phones. He said he waited all day. They never called his name. He didn't even know whether to go home when school let out that afternoon. His mother was dead. All other family lived out of state. And it would actually be several days before his mother's body was identified.
There are so many of those stories. There are so many stories. My doctor accused me of not having a good emotional grasp on the OKC bombing because it was what I talked about when he asked why I went for more than two weeks without sleep after the WTC bombing. I'm not sure I know the difference. I guess I don't have a good emotional grasp on the senseless deaths of hundreds or thousands of innocent people.
Both happened at very vulnerable times in my life as well. I've only just in the past year broken off another long term relationship. I didn't feel lonely until September 11. Then I needed something, someone more than what I had. I found you. I just wanted to thank you. You've pulled me through.
S
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