Recollection
Originally established to document the importance of the tornado to science, this Web site attempts to accomplish that task by recording event times to decent accuracy, by locating geographic positions relatively precisely, by describing property damage with whatever exactness reliable records can provide, and by complaining about other people's past failures to do all of these things.
This is OK, I guess -- if the tornado is a historical object from which you might learn something interesting, but which had little personal effect on you. If, however, you witnessed it, frightened by its fantastic danse macabre or by the twisted and splintered debris it left behind; or if it lashed out at your home or the home of someone you knew or loved; or if the last thing you saw before your body was broken by flying wood and stone -- or if the last thing you ever saw -- was a monster that had fallen down on you from the sky; if any of these things was the case, such a cool and detached approach doesn't actually say much of anything at all. For anyone who wishes to know what has gotten left out, the following personal recollection, which I received on April 2, 2007 from Victoria Duncan (emailed just after 4:00 p.m.), is provided. Some sources insist that the tornado appeared at time X, while others claim it was actually time Y. Don't worry about that. Ms. Duncan tells you, in the first few words of her second paragraph, the real time.
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Find a toddler, say about 30
months old, and watch her play for a moment. Certainly there's
little about this particular toy or game or day that will stay in
her memory longer than dinner time, right? There is nothing about
this moment that she'll recall with exactness a half-century
later. |
Last updated 5 March, 2010