In the mid-sixties, just a few years after peace and comfort took a giant step backward in America, I watched my television as President Johnson presided over the lighting of The National Christmas Tree. At the same time the lights shone along Pennsylvania Avenue, an unrelated event unfolded near the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. A bridge collapsed, dumping cars and people into the Ohio River. News coverage flashed directly from the cheery winter celebration to the bitter cold mayhem that jolted the small river town a couple hundred miles away. Many stories, some even supernatural, surround the event, but the thing I remember most, is that forty-seven people died that night.

The exact year of the accident happened to be nineteen hundred and sixty-six, the year I met Brenda. I wouldn’t call it love at first sight; we were too young for that. We were, however, inseparable, playing outside everyday during that first winter. She could ice skate like Peggy Fleming, while I resembled Red Skelton during his clumsiest routine. At Christmas, she gave me a box of Band-Aids as a joke; I didn’t think well enough yet to give her anything.

Every night on the news during the late sixties and into the seventies, we received the daily number of casualties from the other side of the world, Vietnam. There were three Americans killed one day, and seven the next, while hundreds of enemy soldiers were being reported dead. Nobody knew we were being lied to. On many of those days, hundreds of our young men were dying as well. My impression of war was bound to those numbers. I can still see the box that appeared on the screen every night: seven dead, fourteen injured, three missing in action.

Brenda and I watched together. Her older brother had been drafted and spent eighteen months in the war. We were simply growing up during this time, feeling our way through a teenager’s life, learning to deal with the new temptations presented to us. We both let our hair grow long, allowing her to look like Cher, while I took on the appearance of Sonny’s ugly brother.

On the twenty-fifth of May, in nineteen seventy-nine, American Airlines Flight one-ninety-one, departed from Chicago, but crashed before it reached its Los Angeles destination. The television report that evening ended the segment by telling us that two hundred and seventy-three people died in the crash. Somehow it seemed important to know that two of them had been on the ground when the plane came down on top of them.

Brenda and I had our only child that year. We named him Andrew, and he grew tall and handsome, just like a prince. The years flew by as diapers turned to baseball uniforms, and eventually into tuxedoes for school dances. He made us proud, and the three of us held onto that same love that started one long ago winter on a frozen lake with me looking up at Brenda from the seat of my pants.

In nineteen hundred and ninety-five, at about nine o’clock in the morning, a bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. One hundred and sixty-eight people died. For some reason, every reporter searched for that information as if he or she would win a prize if they uttered the correct number first. I don’t remember who won, but they were quick to add that the toll included nineteen children.

Andrew was a teenager at the time. Brenda had a government job, and worked at the Murrah building. She had punched in a little before nine. It had been my idea to move to Oklahoma a few years before that, because it seemed like a safe place. We were supposed to be securely tucked into the belly of the country, far away from body counts and daily reports of untimely death. I saw the news on a television in my office at a quarter past nine, well before word on the death toll was available, but every reporter was guessing at the count, speculating on the magnitude of the event. The jolt carved a picture into my mind that blotted out the screen. I saw the ice break. A final fall to the surface of the frozen lake had started a crack that would drown everything that existed since nineteen sixty-six, and the only number left in my head was one.