by Janis Patterson/Janis Susan May
Last week we marked the tragic
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on our country. I can tell you
exactly where I was when I first heard the news – sipping coffee
and listening to the radio in the back yard after The Husband left
for work, appreciating the lovely weather and our hopeful garden. I
will wager that every other American of an age to take notice at that
time can tell you where they were, too.
It is sad that we must mark the
milestones of time with such tragic memories. I wasn’t born when
the attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted us into WWII, but my parents’
generation and the ones before it to a person could tell you exactly
where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news
that changed our world forever.
Same with the assassination of JFK.
Whether you loved him or hated him, his death, perhaps more
particularly the manner of his death, created an inescapable wound on
our national psyche. Everyone I know can say exactly where they were
and what they were doing at that fateful moment. I was sitting in my
senior English class, disgruntledly worrying with some obscure
conjugation problem that seemed dreadfully important at the time. For
what it’s worth, I still have never mastered the subjunctive and
can barely spell it. I can remember sitting there stunned as the
principal, his voice shaking and brimming with incipient tears, read
the horrid news over the loudspeaker. We all sat in an unprecedented
silence, broken only by some soft sobbing, the heretofore important
English exercise forgotten on our desks. School was over for the rest
of that week, though we had to sit in silence until the regular
release time.
Another memory of a school interruption
for a cultural milestone, though a happier one. I remember sitting in
my junior high science class listening to the radio broadcast of John
Glenn’s spaceflight, the first time man had ever orbited the earth.
This was the stuff of science fiction, a perceived gateway to a
brighter and better future – one to which we have unfortunately not
lived up – and our principal thought we should learn this turning
point of history by participating in it through listening as it
happened instead of reading about it later. I remember an entire
school of youngsters all uncharacteristically silent, hanging on the
commentator’s overblown words.
Same thing with the moon landing. My
parents and I had been to San Antonio to visit an aunt and, on the
way back, listened to the radio as practically every final inch of
the space flight was described. Knowing that we would never make it
home to see the actual landing on TV, we stopped at a Hillshire Farms
café (I think that was the name) and sat there for what seemed like
hours, glued to their tv as the space capsule finally settled onto
the surface of the moon. History, indeed.
Perhaps less globally impacting but
still possessing an emotional punch, I can remember other tragedies
and where I was when the news came through. John Lennon’s murder –
a party. Princess Grace’s unexpected death – visiting a friend.
I was never a particular fan of Lennon, but Princess Grace’s death
hit me hard. (She was the icon of my set – an idol to be emulated,
though we were all too wise to ever aspire to match her incredible
beauty and style.) Likewise I can tell you where I was when the space
shuttle Challenger exploded in mid-air and, decades earlier, the
submarine Thresher vanished. I can remember the wave of fear I felt
when the razor’s edge of the Cuban Missile Crisis was revealed in
its naked danger of our own extinction and the moment the first Gulf
War was declared.
There are others, and I’m sure
everyone has their own ‘right now, right here’ never to be
forgotten moments. Some of yours will doubtless be different from
mine, but there are always those – 9/11, Pearl Harbor, et al –
that are merciless engraved on our collective consciousness. And that
is not totally bad, for those who do not remember the past are doomed
to repeat it.
UPDATE
My publishing blitz is going apace, in
spite of laggardly distributors and positively malign computers.
Enough said on both subjects, or I shall become prodigiously profane.
This fortnight’s offering is THE AVENGING MAID, a re-release of a
traditional Regency Romance with a shiny new cover and a thorough
re-editing as well as a never-before-done paperback. If the
publishing gods permit, it should be available on all major outlets,
but after this week of slow uploading and sometimes clueless customer
help personnel, I’m not guaranteeing anything.
It is, however, a fun read about a
fashionable young miss who – in spite of the risk to both her
reputation and her life – goes to work as a scullery maid at the
school where her brother died in order to find out the truth about
his death. She does not expect to fall in love with one of the
masters, a mysterious man who may or may not be part of the evil
there.
