Challenger

Now we would all know within seconds. Thousands of people would tweet it at once. Your cell phone would pick up that insistent buzz that never means good news. But this was before all that, and I made it out of class and across campus and almost all the way to work before somebody on the street said that Challenger had broken in the sky.

I laughed. It had to be the punch line to some absurd joke, and I had just missed the setup. I kept walking, toward the college newspaper where I worked, and then I saw another one of the editors. As soon as I saw her eyes, I knew. She grabbed my arm and said: "Call everybody."

College can be a wonderful bubble. Tragedy is getting dumped by your girlfriend. Terror is a test you didn't study for. On Jan. 28, 1986, I was a senior at the University of Georgia and nothing really bad had ever happened to me. I was 22 but I was still a boy.

We had to put out a paper. I remember ripping updates off the old wire machine, thinking maybe this version would say it was all a mistake. The photos showed a corkscrew of smoke, like something a pilot would do to show off. But at the top of the plume, where the space shuttle was supposed to be, there was nothing.

It's weird, the things that turn you from boy to man, from girl to woman. By the time my 20s were over I was on my fourth town in my third job, had gone through a couple of hard breakups, my dad had died, and I got cancer and got rid of it. I was a grown man.

And when I trace it back I think I started feeling grown on that day 25 years ago, when all of a sudden my little college newspaper job was important, because something terrible had happened, and people were expecting us to help make sense of it, and give them something to hold on to and remember it by.

That's still, basically, my job today.

All of this is really just a way to open the door for you. If you remember that day, step in and tell your story.