Where were you when ...

The death of the evil Osama bin Laden is one of those historic, watershed moments in one’s life in which you remember the exact circumstances under which you heard the news. Wow. That was a terrible sentence. But I don’t feel like rewriting it. You get the idea.

Anyway … if you are old enough to recall, everyone knows where and what they were doing when they heard about JFK’s assassination. Not me. That tragedy occurred precisely nine months before I was born. Hmmm.

The Space Shuttle disaster is another such event. I was actually a college senior, walking into Donnelly Hall for class, when I heard about that terrible moment in history back in 1986.

9.11 … Geez, I remember that one Tuesday morning as vividly as though it were last Tuesday as opposed to 10 years ago this September.

The bin Laden thing is quite interesting. On pretty much any other “normal” night in my life, I would have been long asleep when the news broke late on Sunday night.

But Sunday was not a “normal” day. In fact, it was a rather lengthy day. It started, as usual, with my morning jog, at around 5 a.m. Then, it was off to Marist to get the van loaded up for a track trip to Yale. Great day in the sun, as we have recounted here.

Upon arriving back to Marist in the late afternoon, though, instead of typing up the results at home on the laptop, it was time to change into my formal wear for the Senior Awards Banquet. By all accounts, this went well, despite the fact that I had to make not one but two speeches.

I departed for home a little after 10 p.m., exhausted but also wired from all the coffee I downed with Vess at the banquet.

Naturally, there was Sunday Night Baseball to listen to on the radio, a bonus in that the Mets were playing the Phillies. Much to Salek’s dismay, the Amazins were actually winning this game, 1-0. Upon arriving home and getting changed and ready for bed, I remembered to check on the Mets’ game – figuring, accurately, that their atrocious bullpen would cough up this tenuous the lead.

By the time I turned on the TV, there was no surprise at all to see the score was tied at 1-1. But, what was that crawl at the bottom of the ESPN screen about BREAKING NEWS and TURN TO ABC NEWS for details?

THAT’S how I found out about the despicable terrorist menace’s very timely demise – checking out a basically meaningless early-season ballgame. The baseball game was forgotten and it was time to watch the President speak and to find out what exactly happened.

Again, had it been a normal Sunday night, I would have dozed off well before the Mets’ bullpen blew the lead (yeah yeah Bambi, I know they eventually won the game in 14 innings), and I would not have heard about this news until the early morning hours.

Where were you when you heard? What were you doing?

If I had to guess, the overwhelming majority of college students were probably on Facebook or studying in the library (or some combination thereof) when word started spreading. Or, knowing the brain surgeons on our men’s distance team, probably playing video games. Just a hunch.

For me, it feels utterly unnatural to “celebrate” a death. But for those of us who lived through 9.11 and had close friends who were deeply impacted by the events of that day, this surprising bit of news does hold some semblance of satisfaction. I do not like it when politicians and the like speak of “closure” as there is no “closure” ever from such horrors.

Where were you, and what were you doing, on that May Day in 2011? For the rest of our lives, we’ll remember. That’s for sure.