“It’s one those moments when everyone remembers where they were. It’s hard to believe it was 10 years ago.”
I was talking to Tom Whelan about the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last month. The topic came up when Tom remarked that the unseasonably cool August morning reminded him of that morning a decade ago.
I was sitting at an outside table at the Riverside Coffee shop on Dobbin Road and had just finished participating in a conference call with a client in North Carolina. No sooner had I hung than my phone rang again.
“A plane just flew into World Trade Center,” my colleague Rob Freedman exclaimed. “This isn’t good.”
“I wouldn’t put too much into it,” I replied. “It’s probably just a freak accident.”
I wanted to be optimistic. The economic fallout from the dot.com meltdown had been accelerating since that March. The high-flying fiber optic boom that had fueled the local commercial real estate market for the past three years had run out of gas and demand for office space had already fallen off a cliff. I wanted to believe that things couldn’t possibly get worse.
By the time I arrived at the office, it was clear that the world had changed that morning when the second plane struck.
Whether I wanted to believe it or not, things were going to get worse.
History is funny that way. When a historical event is actually taking place, it’s hard to grasp its significance; in time, however, the memory of an otherwise ordinary day becomes embedded in our memories, particularly if that moment is a something that’s shared by an entire community.
This shared memory phenomenon works with good memories, too. The recent success of the Facebook page dedicated to growing up in Columbia is testament to that.
“It’s outta control,” is how the pages creator describes it. Sekou Walker launched the page one night after he came home from reminiscing about growing up in Columbia over beers with some high school friends. They had such a good time that, when he got home, he decided to try and keep the conversation going on Facebook.
When he went to bed that night, the page had five members; but when he checked in the next morning, there were 85. In three weeks, the ranks had swollen to more than 4,000.
To put that into perspective, a similar page for Baltimore City has a little more than 2,000.
For a town with such a comparatively short history, that seems pretty amazing — except when you consider that growing up in Columbia was different. This fact was drilled into young minds by the developers’ early marketing campaign. Columbia was a new town with none of the inherited baggage of the established order. Columbia had open space, open schools and open minds. It even had a path system that was like an interstate highway system for bicycles.
Columbia had tot lots, too. Tucked back in the open space along the pathways, these little playgrounds are also sources of uniquely Columbia memories. As Sekou told me, these memories had more to do with adolescent hormones than with pre-school playtime.
And from the very beginning, it had a rock ’n roll palace that was the envy of every community in the Corridor. In early years, attendance at concerts by groups like The Who was at least five times larger than the total population of the then-new town. Talk to anyone who grew up in Columbia back then, and they’ll likely recall that evening.
That makes sense. Merriweather is one institution that has remained constant during 44 years of Columbia history. Jim Rouse has passed away, and the company he created that conceived Columbia is now not much more than a Wikipedia entry. But for many of the young people who still converge on Symphony Woods during the warm months to catch their favorite musical acts, Merriweather is the shared connection with past generations of Columbians.
For a theater that was originally intended as a summer home for the National Symphony Orchestra, history took a decidedly different path.
Dennis Lane co-hosts “and then there’s that… ,” a bi-weekly local news podcast on hocomojo.com, and blogs about stuff around here at wordbones.com.
