My friend and Great Northern Radio Show writing collaborator Matt Nelson has penned a marvelous essay about the 10 year anniversary of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. He was 13 then, and experienced the event through adolescent eyes and ideals. Having matured into a remarkable writer and journalist today, he’s put those thoughts into a fine piece about ways in which the world weighs on us all.
They said all of them were dead, but no one knew why. I got my journal and tried to write their names down, but the TV was talking too fast and I couldn’t write them all, and I spelled some of the names wrong. I guess I wasn’t a very good journalist back then.
The television didn’t show much — of course. Just a streak of light in the sky, pictures of debris fields that didn’t look like much of anything.
But my 13-year-old imagination was able to fill in the gaps, and those exaggerations are what came to me in the middle of the night, ten years later. I saw the light, while walking on the grass of my home, arching across the sky, and as it got closer, it grew so large. I could even read the name on the side. I saw Columbia approach, and I was filled with a wordless sense of awe and power. This magnificent creation.
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