The A-ha Moments

There are some things that once you experience them the first time, you can never quite replicate that original thrill.  The biggest example I can think of is seeing the Star Destroyer cruise into the frame for the first time in Star Wars.  Remember that?  Didn't you just stop whatever you were doing - bringing a handful of popcorn out of the bucket, taking a sip of your pop, still situating yourself in your seat, whatever it was - and let yourself just totally be blown away?  You can try and relive it and there are other highlight moments to enjoy about it:  the first time you show it to your kids, seeing it on Blu-Ray, and so on.  But nothing really compares to that first time you sat down in the theatre, not really knowing what to expect and that's what George Lucas gives you in the opening minute of the film.   I probably was initiated as a Star Wars nerd for life, hook, line and sinker, right at that very moment.

There are other moments that are simply once in a lifetime moments that take you by storm and change you at your core.  On the one side of those events your life was one way, but only an eye blink later, things have forever been altered.  Not always for the better, but sometimes so.  We probably all have them.  What are some of yours?  Probably a lot of people would say the first time they were proposed to.  Sadly, that would not be one of mine.  I have no distinct memory of that moment.  And I never really did.  It's like we came to a business arrangement just somewhere along the line, and I seem to remember that I probably pressured Greg a bit; I was a little older, had been on my own for a while and was ready for the next phase.  Of course, looking back on it I know now that it is not about where I was in my life that mattered, it is about where we both were, but I thought I was mature back then as opposed to really being that way so I probably assumed it was best for him, and I somehow was divested with the wisdom to know what that was.  Anyway, I digress...  Probably everyone flashed to the collective moment we all share:  watching the World Trade Towers go down in flame and smoke  and knowing the world we relied upon and our sense of our own security within it was now irrevocably changed.

But in consideration of my own question, without that marriage proposal thing to fall back on and not wanting to trot out the first time someone laid each of my daughters in my arms, because that goes without saying, I immediately ticked off a series of searingly sad/dramatic moments that have taken place over the last few years.  All of course leading up to the biggest life changer of all:  the knock on the hotel door that led me to be face-to-face with that young, miserable looking West Virginia trooper - wanting so clearly and so badly to be any where but there to deliver what he had to have known was horrific news - in the earliest hours of June 21, 2009.  Wow, there were a lot of life changing moments if I stop to think about it.  Probably a lot of people have one or two in their entire life.  I'm not bragging.  Far from it.

Surely, I press myself, there must have been some happy turn of event in there as well.  What I came up with was a moment so charged that our entire family's future course teetered on an edge.  One thing said differently, a different decision made or even a qualification on the one that was made, and life would be very, very different for all of us.  But, instead, on May 24, 2010 at around 8 in the evening in the middle of a heated argument actually my husband asked me where I wanted to go and I said Pittsburgh.  And he said okay, that's where we'll go.  That is my A-ha Moment.

I will tell you why that was such an A-ha moment next time.