tsunami, chernobyl, challenger

Eight days ago an earthquake caused a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The first reports estimated twenty thousand dead. The toll is over a hundred and fifty thousand now. Mom's friend Regina was with an archaeological tour in Sri Lanka, but after a couple of tense days Uncle Dee emailed Mom the news Regina's group is safe.

When the news reports new numbers of dead th'Mr tells me. I'm not sure why.

My attitude is hard for me to explain ...this is a natural disaster. It's sad, it's too bad, but there is nobody to blame. I guess it's this attitude which has kept me ignorant of so much history. It was ten years after the Chernobyl disaster before I realized it happened the same year that the space shuttle Challenger blew up. I'd been aware of a "nuclear disaster" at Chernobyl, but it was an awareness in the abstract, like knowing there was slavery in this country before the "civil" war.

About Challenger:

I arrived in Florida on the eighteenth of January, 1986. My twentyfifth birthday was nine days later. The day after my birthday I was at work, on a construction site somewhere in Orlando, where I was working with a crew doing "cleanup." It was morning break, and the forklift operator asked me if I know how to drive one of these...

"Climb on and watch." I stood on the step, holding onto the cage of the black and yellow machine while he demonstrated the levers; left for forward, neutral and reverse, and right, which operated all the boom's functions. I liked the powerful feel of the machine, the way the large tires churned the dust.

Someone shouted, "Look!" My new teacher stopped the Cat and pointed to the eastern sky, ducking to see under the roof's gridwork. I leaned to the side and watched along with everyone else as a tiny winking silver cone shot straight up, trailed by a wide white contrail. About half way from horizon to straight up we heard a faint "boom" as the contrail split into two uneven segments - the larger two-thirds quickly dissipating to clear blue sky without varying its course, while a smaller third kept its white clarity but described an arc back toward the earth, nearly completing a semicircle before it, too, faded. I heard someone say, "I hope it's not the Russians."

"What is it?" I asked. I hadn't seen a newspaper or television since I'd left Kentucky, three weeks earlier.

"The space shuttle."

"Something's wrong."

"There was a lady on board, a teacher." Bits and pieces of information trickled in and were absorbed. If I hadn't been a mere fifty miles away, been there and seen it happen, no doubt Challenger would be another abstract in my mind, like Chernobyl, like this Indonesian tsunami.

It's not that I don't want to know. I don't know why my attention doesn't stretch to what's not immediate to me. I have never been in the habit of asking questions, instead being satisfied with the input of my senses, which is often so much that I overload and shut down.

I'm not explaining well.