My Trip to Legoland California: The Continuation
Entry posted by Kaleidoscope Tekulo
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After our visit to the Lego store in Colorado, our family continued our short vacation normally. I remember looking up at the sky. The buildings sent sparks of cold lightning through my body. Normally people think looking up to the stars and thinking of the universe makes them feel insignificant and small. For me, I mostly felt that way whenever I saw a clear blue sky. The buildings in comparison did not help.
The call came when we were heading back to our home. During our road trip, my mother noticed she had a voicemail on her cell. When she checked it, the entire family was... well, concerned by what she had to say.
"Oh my god... Oh my god, oh my god..." The words continued to present themselves over and over.
"What?! What?" My brothers and I and even our dad continued to ask for what seemed an eternity packed into a single minute.
"[LOL you don't get to know my real first name. Trololololol] won a trip to Legoland!"
Now, I don't exactly recall what my reaction was at the time. I assume it involved goosebumps, a pounding heart and pinching myself expecting to wake up back in our hotel room. As you could imagine I had a lot to think about on the way home.
The trip was for four people. Our mother decided she would stay home, which meant our dad, Akano, KK and I would be leaving for California during our summer break the following year. That was the plan, anyway. I remember I was a bit bummed that I was taking my brothers (we did NOT get along as children) instead of my best friend from school. If I had the power to decide who would go with me on the trip, I could tell you that I would've had no intentions of taking either Akano or KK with me. Fortunately for them I was still only nine and our parents wouldn't allow me to be so cruel (lightweights. XP).
Now, during the fall, I would spend my time imagining what the trip would be like. I was in pretty high spirits most of the time; heck, it was hard not to be. It's not every day a kid has a dream like this become a reality. It sounds really childish (well, I was a child after all), but back then I guess I just thought the world was simple. Black and white; good and evil ... it was simple, really, the way the world worked. Adults always seemed to make things complicated for no reason. They would argue about... oh, politics or who was right and who was wrong. It just always seemed dumb to act that way, childish even for a child. Back then I thought I would never understand those silly adults. Though, that was before September of 2001.
I woke up on the eleventh and got ready for school. I was in fourth grade. The day seemed normal enough. Take the bookbag, grab some money for lunch, and set out alone for the bus. Akano and KK were in middle school by this time, so they had to wake up even earlier. Those mornings on the bus seemed a lot quieter than they used to, though I was glad, in my own way, to have a little time to think. The bus arrived at my elementary school and I got off and went to my classroom like always. Our teacher told us we would be doing a news project today and that we'd watch the news and do a project about what was going on in the world today.
She turned on the classroom TV and switched the channel to the news. By that time, only the first plane had hit the world trade center. Our teacher immediately turned the TV off. Trying her best to smile, she told us we would be working on a different project today. She handed us out some worksheets to fill out, and she went to contact the principle, I assume, about what was happening. In the meantime the students of our class were talking about the news we'd just heard. I can't remember if I was one of the children who got picked up from school by their parents that day... Actually, I think rode the bus home as usual. Needless to say, with everything that happened with the airlines, our trip was postponed. That wasn't my biggest concern, though.
After that day, things were scary. I wasn't sure what was going to happen and all I knew was that our country was at war. I remember my friends and I wondering if the school lunch had poison in it as an attack on the school. It sounds silly to even think that sounds logical now, but back then it just made me nervous. My friends and I were talking about how we'd prefer a quick and painless death. It scared me to think about death back then. I remember thinking to myself that I didn't want to die.
After a month or so had passed, I had realized that life before that day and life after that day weren't so different. I still woke up at the same time, I went to the same school with the same teacher and the same friends. Over time I began to realize how lucky I was to be a kid. My life didn't seem to change at all, and yet others that day lost so much more. That was one of the earliest times in my life where the world didn't seem so black and white anymore. Shades of grey started to appear in my line of vision. I still had a long way to go before I would see in color.
I know my timing isn't quite perfect, but I would like to end this blog post with a tribute to what happened on 9/11/01. I haven't forgotten that day nearly eleven years later... I don't intend to forget any time in the future.
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