Flashback

A few weeks ago, I started a cleaning frenzy and have been progressively take care of projects that I'd meant to do long ago and clean out old stuff that I shouldn’t be keeping around (thus trying to solve one of my idiosyncrasies. )

Among my projects was organizing all my newspaper clips of the last few years. (I had originally planned to do this during my maternity leave. Ha!)

I came across one of my favorite stories, a front-page story in response to the so-called “summer of the shark” in which I got to spend a few days with shark researchers at Mote Marine Laboratory and attempt to demystify shark biology. I had a blast, traveling to St. Petersburg and Charlotte Harbor and spending one whole day on a boat and calling it work.

Then I saw the publication date: September 10, 2001.

It almost gave me chills, reading that date and remembering. The last day before the seminal event of my generation. The last day before our whole perspective would be radically torn apart by four hijacked planes. The last day of a carefree summer. The last day of our innocence.

Then it took me back to THE DAY, the one that will be forever etched in my memory, the one that I will tell to my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren, if I had the chance.

Every generation has such a day. One of my Tai Chi friends just came back from a trip to Hawaii, where she visited to Pearl Harbor and while looking at her photos, she had a vivid recollection of that day. For my parents’ generation, it was the JFK assassination, of course.

And now, I’m sure, for thousands of Louisiana and Mississippi residents, it will be that fateful Aug. 29, 2005, when they saw Mother Nature at her most violent.

May New Orleans be rebuilt and may they once again proclaim in the French Quarter, “Laissez le bon temps rouler.”