Friday 19 April 2024 post begun 1321hrs BST (forgive errors, no time to edit)

 

Right, so a few days ago I looked at the calendar and realised my 50 year high school reunion is coming up in June. Blimey. Fifty years, really?!

 

Right, so the reunion realisation led to the memory of the march along with my classmates (soggy football field, quite ruined my shoes) to drop my folding chair seat to await my turn to be presented my diploma hoping the scorching Southern California sun (omg, blazing down like an oven broiler element) didn't cause me to collapse (stoopid heart thingies). 

 

Whammo, first memory to hit me about that June was waiting to hear back from Garden Grove PD about my academy application. I didn't hear and I didn't hear and I didn't hear back. Ffwd to mid-August and I still hadn't heard.

Which led to deeper rumination on 'what I did the summer after I graduated from high school' and the memories rushed back of touring Sanford University (my step-parents wanted the wine tour and dragged me along claiming the trip was to visit potential universities so they could charge all the expenses to my father), Santa Rosa campus for University of San Francisco, and of course Berkley. 

Which led to recalling crystal clear memories of sitting in a Carmel bay-side restaurant watching a USCG small boat heading out on a SAR...

The rest is history. When I got home from the wine country tour I almost immediately went on an August camping trip with my then very serious boyfriend Gary everyone expected would propose and we would live happily ever after in the married student dorms while he did his med school course and I did my psychology course...

About five days into a 20 day camping trip I knew three things - I did not want to go to Sanford or Berkley or USF. I did not want to marry Gary. I did want to join the USCG because by then I'd given up on GGPD bothering to at least kindly inform me I was not accepted to police academy.

Two years later I was looking for something else whilst on a visit to the step-parents and whoa-ho, what did I find hidden at the bottom of a drawer? The acceptance letter from GGPD dated ten days after I'd applied. The letter arrived to the house but my step-mother hid it, I never saw it. Every now and again I do think about what life would have been like had I seen that letter in time. 

And then I looked at the calendar again and realised it would be the 19th of April in a few days and it hit me it's been 29 years since the OK City bombing.

I was in Guatemala City that day in 1995 watching the nightmare live on television. I can still see the damage to the building, can still hear the sounds coming over the live feed. I remember thinking 'Here's another day I'll always remember where I was and what I saw that day'.  

 

And I remember thinking 'This is the day everything changes', and I was right although at the time I recall thinking I was losing the plot to think the OK City bombing was somehow a global 'game changer' because I hadn't thought that about the 1993 WTC bombing (in the underground car park). But OK City was somehow a very real 'game changer', looking back now, more than anything else to that day, the OK City bombing caused a global dimension shift. 

Seven months later another day I would always remember - 4th November 1995 when live on television Rabin was assassinated. 

As I type this post I have the news on as 'background noise' - currently GB News is reporting two things - late last night Israel retaliated against the monstrous Iranian regime (rightly and with restraint to prevent civilian casualties as they always do - there is NO genocide being committed by Israel and anyone saying Israel is enacting a genocide is insane). And a man claiming to have a grenade with which he intended to blow himself up in front of the Iranian Embassy in Paris. (he's been arrested, his grenade is a fake, and doubtless he will soon be identified as either a mental patient (current code for muslim) or a 'far-right white supremacist'. 

Fifty years ago we graduated from high school. I doubt any of the 566 kids I graduated with 13th June 1974 imagined anything like what was coming in our future.