Although I was out of the country at the time it struck, whenever I was near a television, I couldn't tear myself away from CNN International. Watching the footage repeatedly almost became an obsession. Not long afterward, I started thinking about how the inevitable passage of time affects the way a cataclysmic event is remembered.
Would it be like Nov. 22, 1963 when JFK was shot in Dallas? It's not only that I remember the event, but the date itself brings instant recall of where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the news. I was in elementary school, and distinctly remember how my whole class accused a classmate, one prone to pranks, of making up a vicious lie that the president's motorcade had been ambushed. Even though I remember when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were gunned down five years later, I don't have an instant association with those dates the way I do with the president's assassination, the defining historical reference for many of my generation.
For the previous generation, Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, unquestionably had the same effect. For the generation after mine, Sept. 11 became the date to be reckoned with.
For almost 40 years, the day Kennedy was killed, at least for me, had no parallel. But the events of Sept. 11 changed all that. Life as we knew it in America changed in an instant - collectively, we knew a new version of normal would take shape. Sept. 11 became my children's Nov. 22. As long as they live, they will be able to automatically recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard that two jets were flown deliberately into the twin towers.
There have been myriad life-altering national and world events that have become part of the fabric of my life. They include, in no particular order, the shootings at Kent State, President Nixon's resignation, Jonestown, the downing of Pan Am flight 103, the crash of TWA flight 800, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the accidents that took the lives of Princess Diana and America's prince, JFK Jr. Another event that's seared into my mind was the day basketball star Magic Johnson, one of the first celebrities to go public, announced that he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS.
And of course, there was Columbine. I had never heard of Littleton, Colo., the town outside Denver where the worst school shootings in this country took place, before the morning of April 20, 1999. For that matter, up until three weeks ago I'd never heard of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, either. For very different reasons, images from both have now left permanent tracks on my soul.
Right before my reporter, Jen Marino, left two weeks ago, I was curious about the events she remembered. Since we're years apart, I wondered where our memories might converge, and what discrepancies there might be. She instantly remembered when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Recalling it instantly plopped her right back into kindergarten. How could I have forgotten the Challenger? Is that what 19 years and many disasters, man-made and natural, later will do? I suppose carnage against the backdrop of a clear blue sky was overtaken in my memory by ... more carnage and blue sky, the events of Sept. 11.
Which brings me back to the tsunami. Right now, it's ripe in my mind. I've donated money to aid organizations, watched experts debate which epidemics are certain to ravage the region, heard about celebrity telethons and inquired about Disna, the little girl from Sri Lanka whom I've been sponsoring for more than a year. Right now the disaster is an open wound that's yet to form a scab that signals the start of healing.
Who knows what will happen in the coming months and years? Will the tsunami have staying power, or will it be replaced in my overloaded consciousness by an even worse catastrophe?
Up until 2004, I remembered Dec. 26 as the date JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in her Boulder, Colo., home. I'm certain the tsunami has now pushed the child beauty queen as far inland in my mind as the huge waves that crashed ashore in south Asia.
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