I spent part of the evening thinking about when the skywalks collapsed in KC when I was seventeen. I was on my way to the Lake with a group of friends and we were in three cars that were following each other. We were laughing and teasing each other and making faces out the windows to each other and singing songs really loud, knowing that the other cars in the group were singing the same song and then the news broke in that the skywalks had collapsed during a party and that a lot of people had died. It took the wind out of all of us and the rest of the drive was in silence. When we arrived at the lake, we all just sat around wondering about the poor people back home that were injured or had died, the news wasn't the same then as it is now and things were not shown as they were happening in most cases and there were no cable news outlets even if the cabin would have had cable at that time. The next day the papers were full of horrible pictures and stories.
I have never forgotten about it, sometimes when I am home and I'm near that hotel I think about how people had died there, but, our lives had gone on and the hotel had repaired the damage and reopened. I remember how the fire and policemen had to have therapy because of the things they had seen and things they had to do to save people, like amputate legs. Not trying to be graphic. It's just things that I remember.