I Still Have the Shoes

April 19, 1995 was a beautiful Oklahoma spring day, sunny, blue skies, lovely.  I had on one of my favorite dresses, so I was smiling a little bit more than usual that day.  I had been at work for about an hour and a half when it happened.  At first we thought it was an accident.  The possibility that a person opened this door to hell didn’t even occur as a possibility.  The questions started when that realization started to crack open our minds to the fact that a person caused it:  Why?  There was a daycare there.  Who would kill kids? Why?  These things happen in other parts of the world, not here.  Then we thought about the people we knew.   In those days before cell phones were common, most of us ran for a landline and spent frantic minutes trying to track down loved ones, praying none of them had business in that part of the city that day. 

I remember the helplessness as they asked people to stay away from the site.  They didn’t know if there were other bombs and the site was so dangerous that they couldn’t use the help we could offer.  Oklahomans don’t stand by.  Watching passively as someone else faces down a horror is not what we do.  We defend.  We help.  We pitch in and take care of our own and other people’s, too.  But we couldn’t follow our instincts, so we watched and we prayed.   

As the day went on and the search and rescue began, the sun disappeared and the rain started. All I could think about was survivors trapped, terrified and injured, and now cold and wet.  But emotionally the rain somehow felt right.  It felt like we all unintentionally willed it to happen, like Nature responded to what we were all feeling.

The one thing I could think to do was give blood.  When I got to the Red Cross nearest to my home in Tulsa, I had to park about half a mile away because there were so many cars.  The shoes I had on were a little fancy and definitely not made for walking in the rain.  When I finally got in the building, I remember how quiet it was.  I had donated there before and it was always cheerfully noisy and bustling, but not that day.  It was busier than I’d ever seen it but almost silent.  In the place I could normally donate on a walk-in basis, the next available appointment was two weeks away.

I was lucky.  Some loved ones had some close calls – the meeting in the Murrah Building cancelled at the last minute and other aggravations suddenly recast as life preservers  – but everyone was alright.  Physically alright.    

I’ve long since donated the dress I had on that day, but I still have the shoes.  I am an “out with the old” kind of person, donating clothes, tossing and recycling things.  I hate clutter, but I can’t bring myself to give up those shoes.  I guess they help me remember what it was like before, and what it was like after.  I need to remember.  And I do.