Impossible to forget

Today is the anniversary of one of those days when something happened so momentous that we always remember where we were when we heard the news.

I was at home on Sept. 11, 2001, unemployed, doing a little freelance work. I was scheduled to have a phone call with a woman from the state peanut board to discuss a speech I had written for her. Yes, you’ll do anything when you don’t have regular income coming in.

I spent my day like pretty much everybody else in America, watching the TV reports, talking to family and friends, going through the feelings of fear, incredulity, outrage and sadness. My kids were in elementary school and they knew what had happened, but they were too young to really comprehend it. I remember that afternoon watching them, my son playing football with his friends, my daughter jumping on the trampoline, and wishing I could be that carefree and oblivious again.

I once went to the top of one of the Twin Towers. What an unbelievable view it was from up there. The last time I was in New York City many years ago, I tried to talk my wife into going to the top, but she had no interest. So we took a subway ride instead, which trust me, was much scarier than being high above the city.

The first real big news happening in my life that had the “I’ll always remember where I was when I heard it” importance was when Elvis Presley died. I was in the backyard playing Whiffleball and my mother stuck her head out the window to tell me.

I wasn’t much of an Elvis fan at that age, so I wasn’t too upset, but my mom had never told me something like that before, so I figured it was a big deal. Now, a couple of months later, when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashed and Ronnie Van Zant died, I DID get upset. That was a big deal.

I was watching Monday Night Football on Dec. 8, 1980. I turned the game off and was listening to the radio to help me fall asleep, and the first song I heard was Strawberry Fields Forever. Then came In My Life. The DJ then started talking about the death of John Lennon, and my heart sank. I turned the TV back on to hear Howard Cosell confirming what I had just heard.

I remember the day Ronald Reagan got shot. I had just come home from school and I was watching one of those goofy Beatles cartoons they used to show on Channel 36 out of Atlanta. I even remember that on that day’s episode, the last song they played was Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby, the Beatles’ version of the old Carl Perkins song.

Then I changed channels, and the Reagan shooting was all over the news. I watched for a little while, saw that he was not going to die, and resumed daydreaming about high school girls.

It was bitterly cold the day in 1986 when I left class at the University of Georgia and walked into my apartment and turned on the TV, only to see pieces of metal falling into the ocean. The space shuttle had exploded, and it was really a traumatic thing for the country. My last class of the day was canceled that afternoon.

It’s funny how some of those things you wish you could forget never leave you. I often have forgotten what I had for lunch by the time I sit down for supper, but I’ll always remember where I was when I heard about all of those terrible things. I'm sure you will, too.