Memory's walk

 Today is another of Those Days, when detail is so sharp it can draw blood. Memory is a faithless companion sometimes -- what we think we remember is sometimes only a hazy scrap, lacking in context -- but on days like this memory's walk is as true as a razor's edge.

And so to January 28, 35 years ago.

You'll read about it today on the news wires and see it on social media and the teevees, because Jan. 28, 1986 remains a day that sears. It's a billowing white cloud in the blue Florida sky where the contrail of a rocket should have been, trailing party streamers of smoke as if this were some sort of macabre celebration. It's seven lives gone, like that, including a New Hampshire schoolteacher who was along for the ride.

It's the notion of American infallibility gone, too, in that same awful instant.

The moment the space shuttle Challenger blew up is the moment America paid for its assumptions, and the complacency that rides shotgun with assumptions. We assumed our space program was charmed, you see. We assumed it would never again have an Apollo 1 tragedy, that Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee dying in a cabin fire paid the bill in full 19 years less a day before the Challenger went up.

In the years between, we'd put men on the moon and brought back the crew of Apollo 13  and launched piles of shuttle flights, and everything worked out. And so we came to believe everything always would work out, and to think of shuttle launches as just another routine part of another routine day.

They are not, of course. They never are. And so when the Challenger blew up, it became one of Those Days, when memory is a razor and we remember what we were doing, what kind of day it was, Where We Were When We Heard The News.

When Dallas happened, I was on the bus home from school and the sun was shining in that low burnished November way, and two kids sitting behind me were talking about Kennedy getting shot with a rifle.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, I was at home watching "Daniel Boone" and my parents were at the grocery and the network cut in with a news flash about a shooting in Memphis.

When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, it was a June morning and my friend and I had just awakened after camping out in his treehouse, and he turned on the radio and we both yelped "What?!" at exactly the same time.

I heard about John Lennon on the car radio as I drove to work in the predawn December darkness. And I heard about the Challenger in a bookstore in Anderson, In., on my day off.

It was two days after the Bears won the Super Bowl, the woman at the cash register had a radio on, and gradually the hushed tone of the commentators penetrated my usual bookstore fog. 

"What's going on?" I asked.

The woman at the register looked up. To this day -- razor memory again -- I can vividly recall the blank incomprehension on her face.

"I think the space shuttle just blew up," she said, softly.

Thirty-five years later I still hear her.