In the City

At the center of an active city bustling with the everyday business sets the Oklahoma City National Memorial, to me the most peaceful place in the world. Walking through one of the doors where the street ends and time stands still one leaves the entire bustle of the city and enters back to a day we all watched our innocence come down, as car alarms sounded off and the smoke from fires raised up into a clear morning sky turning the sky black with smoke.

At 9:00am just getting my cup of wake up juice I set at my table to read the news when out of a clear day comes a thunderous sound like a strike of lightning hitting outside my kitchen window. I lived about 10 miles to the west of down town Oklahoma City where the truck bomb was, but this sound was right outside my window. The glass had been shaken by the blast, it was a sound that went to your bones. After coming to the knowledge that this was not a bolt out of the blue I walked out my front door and into the street with the neighborhood to see if I could see what it was. And then returned to go to the TV when the news started to brake and watched with the rest of the world, our city in chaos.

I saw the bomb site about one week after and seeing it on TV and then going into the city are not the same. It was a bomb that was intended to be for the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building but had damaged so much of our city. Street lights from blocks away had been bent back the wrong way by the blast. I remember looking up from one of the street corners, we stood at a sign and seeing a hole about the size of an apple where a piece of shrapnel had hit. So much of the city was damaged.

168 faces are not here, 168 smiles do not smile, 168 missed Christmas this year, 168 voices are not heard, 168 lives were lost in one…

To our friends, In the City

KF 1/03/08

You can visit the OCNM web page to read more about that day that changed our lives forever.

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