Today is April 19

Where were you at 9:03am ten years ago today? this blogger was there . I was in Dallas working at the video store when my mother called to ask if I had seen the news. I was at work I told her, we don't watch the news on our TV's all day, we watch videos of Milk Money and Mask all day, it took me about five minutes to learn how to rip the coax out of the back of a video game monitor and set it up to use as a TV. We had steady business that day, customers would come in looking blank and wandered around trying to find something else to watch on their TV. They ended up standing in front of our TV. No one watched any videos that day. After eight hours in front of the TV at work I went home and cried.

A few years later I was at a friends wedding and got to talking to another guest, the only other person there who could use ya'll in a sentence with out giggling about it. The wedding was taking place during Tim McVeigh trial and the guy I was talking to was a mess. The only two subjects he could discuss were 1) the minutes and hours and days after the explosion and 2) Memories of his years with the bride at their DOD High School overseas. Lather, rinse, repeat.

He was a sports reporter for the Oklahoma City paper and had been out late covering a game, so he was still in bed at 9:03 am. I learned he lived downtown and the explosion had woken him up that morning, threw him out of bed. He lived with his brother then and his first thought after finding himself of the floor was his brother had done something to him. Then he saw is brother standing in his door way looking horrified, he then thought it was a tornado and then that maybe a truck hit the building. Then he and his brother saw the smoke. He got off the floor and went to work. He worked for 24 straight hours. He ended up writing obits. He learned later that one of his friends had died there.

He would repeat that story and then go back to High School stories and then go back to That Day. I thought about him when McVeigh was executed, I wondered if it helped him. I learned later that The guy I had spoken to had become born again by that time, I wondered if that helped him.

CNN.com has a feature.

The memorial fence . I was glad to see that it was still there, I was afraid when they built the official memorial that they would have taken it down. They didn't.