History In a Photo Album
We visited with our elderly neighbors tonight. After a dinner of home-made potato soup and grilled cheese, the woman wanted to show us some pictures of her bunnies. As she was flipping through a photo album, she was narrating the subjects. “Here’s our chickens. Here’s our bunny rabbits. Here’s the space shuttle exploding. Here’s Pumpkin as a puppy…”
We stopped her and she pulled out the snapshot of the Challenger disaster. She had an entire series of the launch taken from a church parking lot – about a dozen snapshots all with the church’s cross in the foreground starting with the shuttle in its first seconds of flight and ending with the falling debris and unforgettable crazy spirals made by the solid fuel rocket boosters.
It turns out she once lived near Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and rarely missed a launch until she left Florida and moved back to North Carolina. She was there that day and witnessed first hand the event that I saw on a television screen in college.
I asked her how people reacted, and she acted it out for me. There were gasps followed by shouts of “it’s exploded!” to cries of “no, no, no.” She said that her prayer group held hands as the rockets continued their crazy spiral and the shuttle’s remains rained down on the sea and prayed for the families of the astronauts.
We then went back to her pictures of baby goats and chickens, but I won’t be forgetting those snapshots anytime soon.
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