Events and scents, sights and sounds can, in a nanosecond, transport us back in time. Sometimes we are brought to a beautiful place or time; other times we are abruptly carried back to sad and painful memories. Sometimes both happen at the same time. Such was the case for me when the January 29th mid-air plane crash occurred over the Potomac.
The crash was a tragic loss of life by any estimation. For me, there was an additional impact and effect. It transported me back in time to when I was about 15 and, like the young figure skaters from The Skating Club of Boston who lost their lives in this crash, I spent innumerable hours trying to perfect my jumps and spins on the ice at the (old) Boston Skating Club in Brighton. I hadn’t skated there in many, many years and the club’s rink as I knew it is no longer physically where it was. But when I heard about the skaters who were happily flying back, but ultimately would never return from their competition, I felt an immediate tug to go to the club and skate. The loss felt personal even though I didn’t know anyone on the flight.
As I heard and read reports of the recovery, I thought more and more about the years I spent at BSC and why the loss felt so personal to me. It wasn’t the place — it was the people and what I learned from them. It was Marion Proctor, my first influential skating teacher. It was hot summers in a cool rink, and cold winters under warm heat lamps in the stands. It was learning and teaching, leadership, growth and challenges. It was respect and reverence heard as an audible silence around the 1961 plane crash that took the lives of a different generation of Boston Skating Club skaters. It’s where I learned about protocol and performance, discipline and disappointment, hard work and success.
As I read about the disastrous crash into the Potomac, I learned facts about the Club I either didn’t know or had long forgotten. The Club was founded in 1912, the same year my grandfather began his law practice in Boston, creating the firm my father and I later joined and which laid the foundation for my current Consilium practice. Although 113 years is clearly a long time, the continuity of relationships built and carried on creates an elasticity that makes the passing of those years less relevant. Evolution, and growth, is always possible, even where sad memories remain, because time can soften those previously hard edges.
May the memories of all the people who perished on American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, to Washington D.C. and The Blackhawk Army helicopter, be a blessing to all who knew and loved them.