This is entry No. 246
To go until the Dano 250th Entry Celebration: 3

I sat at a table in one of the small rooms at the end of Notre Dame's North Dining Hall. We called it "Mexico" because it was the side that had the Mexican food � or at least the closest thing to Mexican food at the dining hall. The other end was the Italian side, so we called that Italy. It was one of those days where I ate with the friends from my dorm � other days I walked to lunch with friends from class. But on this April afternoon, it was the guys from Grace Hall sitting around one of the round tables near the salad bar. Chris came in and sat down. Having not had a class that morning, he had been in his room, watching TV. "Hey, did you hear about the explosion?" he asked. None of us had. "Yeah, some big building in Oklahoma City blew up."

That's where I was when I heard about the bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It was all so far away for me. At that point, my freshman year, my only trip west of the Mississippi was a flight to California the summer after eighth grade. My only knowledge of Oklahoma was the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, which I'd read in high school. An aspiring journalist, I watched the news accounts and read the stories about what had happened. I bought the papers the next day, and somewhere in this room, in the piles of newsprint, under issues celebrating Mets championships and New Jersey nor'easters, lie copies of USA Today, the South Bend Tribune and Chicago Tribune, all with the photo of the fireman carrying the dead baby away from the rubble.

I remember Bill Clinton's firm denouncement of the act, of calling those responsible "cowards," of the rather quick investigation that produced one, then two suspects � all from a twisted axle of a rented truck and a partial VIN number. It became the subject of my first Inside Column for our student paper, The Observer. I'd final drawn up the nerve to write my first commentary, and though I didn't know what I'd write about � at first I planned on an attempt at humor � I was inspired to write off the bombing. The extent of my connection to Oklahoma was one freshman I'd met in one class, and the small-world coincidence that her good friend from back home in Tulsa was friends with my buddy Will at Boston College. I don't remember exactly how I wrote the column, but I know it was along the lines of how we cope with these unexpected tragedies. Some editor put a headline of "Can we prepare for the unexpected?" above my first column, the first with my photo to go along with my byline.

I wrote something about how tragedy can strike at any time, and I mentioned the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York a few years prior. I looked for that column on my disks, but I don't think I have it. I may scrounge around for a hard copy, but no luck yet in the places I've searched.

So that's why, despite talking on the phone until 4:30, I woke up at 7:30 this morning � and fell back asleep but managed to awake again at 7:55 � to turn on the TV and watch the coverage of Timothy McVeigh's execution. As the reporters and victims and survivors kept saying, it was the end of a chapter. Not closure, just the end of a chapter.