Listening to Christian Kane sing about his Oklahoma State Of Mind, stirred up memories of one of the most poignant days in my life.

People spout the cliché, “What goes around comes around”, without giving any real thought as to the truth of such things. 

Thirty years ago some fellas came to my part of Maryland looking for coal. This is not a surprising, I live in one of biggest coal producing areas on the east coast. What made these guys interesting was that they were from the oil and gas fields of Oklahoma and Texas, and worked for some little no name outfit that turned out to be a subsidiary of Exxon. 

I live in a very rural area, and we are a bit clannish and suspicious of outsiders, and these oil and gas fellas just couldn’t get their minds wrapped around the fact that we just sort of laughed at them when they said they wanted to put a deep mine in an area that had been stripped out and left for dead 50 years before. 

I told you that story to tell you this one… 

I worked as a secretary for these guys. They were smart, southern gentlemen polite, and could party like the world was ending tomorrow. They had worked for some of the richest people in the country, had been in some places I’d only read about, and taught me things that I later used to gain employment when I spread my wings and moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to work with them. 

In 1979, Oklahoma City was not exactly the hot spot of the country, but for a 22 year-old from rural Maryland, meeting people who worked for J. Paul Getty and Bunky Hunt left one gap-jawed. Barry Switzer and the Oklahoma University Sooners were gods. The SST Concorde made one of its maiden landings on tour of the United States at the Will Rogers Airport, the first space shuttle stopped at Tinker AFB on its way to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and I went to my first World Finals Rodeo. 

My cousin and her husband moved to Prague, Oklahoma. They bought a gas station and convenience store on the borders of the tribal lands of the Sac and Fox Nation. She ran the store while he worked as a master mechanic on some big highway job in the area. I worked for them on weekends, which kept me from getting homesick, and gave me the opportunity to attend some of the best powwows. They became an event I still attend, and a quarter horse racetrack where up and comers in the sport came to run. 

It was also a time of great tragedy in the area. I made it through my first F-5 tornado without knowing. Ignorance is bliss. That tornado went on to nearly wipe out Ft. Sill and Wichita Falls, Texas.

One of the people I worked was a captain in the Air National Guard out of Tinker AFB. He flew one of the cargo planes that brought bodies home from the Jonestown murder-suicide in Guyana.

I eventually worked my way back to Maryland by way of Colorado, where in 1983, I settled back in my hometown and in 1986 married my truck driving husband. 

On April 19, 1995, my husband and I were moving a load of produce from California to Indianapolis, Indiana. I woke up at the Flying J truck stop on the west side of Oklahoma City. We fueled the truck, got a shower and breakfast. My husband climbed in the bunk and I headed east on 40 toward the Turner Turnpike I-44 and Indianapolis. At the I-40 and I-35 split there was a shaking that reminded me of one of the small earthquakes we had experienced in California. 

Suddenly there were police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances coming from all directions. I turned on the FM thinking perhaps something had happened at Tinker AFB, only to hear that there was an explosion at the Murrah Building near downtown. I continued on toward Tulsa and watched the frantic parade of emergency vehicles moving toward Oklahoma City.

All I could do was gaze out at the rolling grasslands along the Turner Turnpike and continue to listen with a heavy heart to the reports coming over the radio.

It’s amazing the influence of a mid-sized city in the state of Oklahoma can have over a 20 year span in one person’s life.