25 Years

January 28th, 1986 was a pretty big day.

First of all, there were birthdays. One of my cousins, who lived nearby and was (and still is) a pretty big part of my life was having her birthday. More importantly on that day though was my high school best friend turning eighteen. We were about halfway through our senior year, and the 18th birthday is a pretty big milestone so the day felt a little different.

Then in my 3rd hour journalism class, one of the other English teachers stuck his head in the doorway to tell our teacher, and us, that the space shuttle launch scheduled that morning had ended in an explosion. Shuttle launches had become so routine that they barely earned a mention on the news, but of course things changed that day. My 4th hour physics class saw us putting aside a day of curriculum to sit listening to the news coming through the teacher's portable radio. No Internet then, no TV in the classroom with access to a 24-hour news cycle back in those days.

I met up with my friend at lunch after physics. He was standing by our lockers with his bag lunch, waiting like he always was since he got there before me and the other guys we ate with. It wasn't a good day for him. His dream back then was to be an air force pilot, and in his wildest dreams maybe finding his way into something as potentially adventurous as flying in a shuttle. "Some birthday present," was his reaction, and that was about the extent of our lunch time conversation that day.

My little sister and I got home from school to find we were again home alone. We had the TV on almost right away to see whatever news we could find out. Our older sister was in her first year of college and had moved out, and our parents were down in the Cities somewhere at a hospital with my grandmother, my dad's mother. She'd been in very poor health for some time and they'd been spending a lot of time down there. Our mother had called the night before to check in with an update of what was going on -- she said that our grandmother wasn't expected to live much longer. It hit me pretty hard to hear that news, since I had not experienced a death that close to me before, and it was all uncharted territory. (If only I had known what the coming decades had in store....)

Our grandmother died within hours of that phone call, though she'd made it long enough for the calendar page to flip over to January 28th. The same day my cousin celebrated her birthday. The same day my best friend turned 18. The same day the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing the six astronauts and the one teacher aboard. I remember that fact vividly, since even though I don't think I'd formally decided to go into teaching yet, I had already known in the back of my mind that was where I was going to eventually wind up.

So, like I said. It was a pretty big day.