12) The Nineties, Part Two

The car of ours which was destroyed in the accident was a Volkswagen Quantum. My parents had been driving the car for a few years but had given it to us as a wedding present. I inherited the auto insurance policy on the car. I had never read the policy or really given it much thought except to pay the monthly premium, but it turns out that the policy provided very good coverage in case of something like this.

The next thing I knew, I had quite a bit of money. This made me ineligible for the government program that I had been on to attend college, but it set me up so that I would not have to work for quite some time. But this was not what I wanted, I would rather bring Karen back.

I was battered pretty good from the accident. I had to go back to my parents' house for a while because I needed some help to put on my shirt and coat. Finally after about a month, I was healed enough to be able to do a few pushups. It was not until this time that I felt really alive again. A couple of weeks after that, I was completely back to normal and only had the task of getting back in shape.

I noticed again how aerobic exercise can overcome stuttering because during the time that I was unable to exercise, the stuttering that I had suffered from previously reemerged. But then it went away again when I regained physical fitness.

I continued with school and really plunged into reading, as well as exercise. I read some newspapers from England om a regular basis, as well. British newspapers are particularly good for international news. There is a strong tradition of being well-informed about the whole world and not just one's own country.

My primary interest was science, but I really wanted to understand all I could about the world as a whole. I had a world view in which America was about four and a half percent of the world and Britain was one percent of the world. I was not about to ignore the rest of the world.

The family that I had married into had not liked foreigners or anything foreign, although this was not true of Karen herself. After she died, I went in the opposite direction. I bought a lot of cassette tapes of different languages. I am not a talented linguist, but I wanted to at least gain a familiarity with the different languages and I would have the background so that I could learn one or more languages if I really had a reason to do so and speakers of that language to talk to.

1992 saw the spring riots in Los Angeles when four white police officers were acquited of severely beating a black man and the beating had been caught on videotape. Part of Florida was devastated by Hurricane Andrew. The upcoming presidential election was between incumbent Republican George Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton and, independent Ross Perot.

Yugoslavia was often in the news as the old ethnic tensions in the country surfaced after the binding force of Communism had disintegrated. Algeria had effectively voided an election in which an Islamic party had won, violence would continue for years.

As highly as I valued learning, school itself became a struggle. My motivation for going back to school was to get a job where I would earn enough money to live more comfortably and to take Karen on a trip back to England, among other places. But now, Karen was gone and I had more than enough money for the foreseeable future.

Over the summer of 1992, I was reading a vast amount but not having a job or a set schedule, my sleeping times began to drift so that I was awake much of the night and would sleep very late into the day. This became a problem when school started back, but the last thing I wanted to do was to get dependent on medications to sleep.

Furthermore, training to be a lab technician was not what I had really wanted to do. I had trouble with school, particularly with the lab classes. But eventually, I just took a semester off from school, switched to liberal arts math/science and graduated.

I did not get all top grades, but on the plus side I had completed many more classes than those which were necessary for graduation. I had also went to this college after high school and almost had enough classes for a fine arts degree as well, but that does not really do much for getting a job.

There is one thing which I learned during this time back in college that would prove invaluable later. For the first time, I really grasped how the trigonometric functions worked and a lot of my later writing would depend on this.

After taking the semester off from school, I began keeping a notebook outside of school. I would write down every fact about science that I did not already know, regardless of whether I learned that fact in school or in outside reading. I filled a number of large notebooks with facts and would review them periodically.

One day in the late spring of 1992, my parents were outside when they were approached by a new born gray kitten with black stripes. They said that the kitten was lost and hungry and was not old enough to be away from her mother. They fed her and waited to see if she would go back home, but she didn't. The kitten showed every sign of being abandoned.

The kitten was named Essie. She is an old cat now and has been with us ever since.

I was still listening to music. But I did a stricter review of the music that I would listen to. It was mostly those cheerful, light-hearted Sixties songs.

There was Shirley Matthews with "Big Town Boy" and "Tobacco Road" by The Nashville Teens.

As you can probably see, I was listening to less and less music as time went on because there are progressively fewer songs which I am listing.

In 1993, the famous Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar, was finally located and killed in a shootout in Medellin.

A truck bomb exploded in the parking garage under one of the World Trade Center towers. The plan was to topple the one tower into the other. The explosion did not have enough force to accomplish that, but eight years later the terrorists would return.

The U.S. sent soldiers to try to keep peace in Somalia. A former province of Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina was now in the news frequently for ethic violence.

Canada had a contentious election. Conservative Brian Mulroney had really become unpopular, due to economic issues. He had resigned and ended up being replaced by Kim Campbell, from the same party. She had then lost a general election to Liberal Jean Chretein.

In a parliamentary democracy, it is actually the party which is governing and not so much the prime minister himself (or herself). The party can choose to replace the prime minister at any time. While in countries like the U.S., the president cannot be replaced at will by his party.

Jean Chretein was one of the best national leaders ever. During his tenure, Canada was rated by the United Nations as the best country in the world in which to live for eight years, if I remember correctly. It was only after Chretein was gone that the Scandinavian countries usually rate as the best.

There was more news. In the worst cult ending since Jonestown in 1978, the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh ended with the wooden compound of their cult, in Waco, Texas going up in a spectacular inferno as federal agents moved in.

Across the border in Ontario, two girls in their early teens had mysteriously disappeared. It would ultimately lead to the arrest and conviction of Paul Bernardo.

1994 saw a fantastic astronomical event as comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with the giant planet Jupiter. This planet acts as a kind of massive gravitational vacuum cleaner that absorbs bodies which might otherwise collide with earth. Maybe God planned it that way.

What would happen if a comet like this struck the earth? Let's just say you do not even want to think about it.

There was a horrible scene from Honolulu on the news. An African elephant called Tyke had made it clear in the past that she could not stand the life of captivity and performing stunts in front of audiences. Still, Shrine Circus kept her in service.

One day, Tyke killed her trainer and got through a chain link fence. News cameras followed as she ran through the streets of Honolulu with blood all over her from police bullets. Finally, Tyke collapsed in the street from the effects of the bullets in her head. She died a slow and miserable death as cops continued firing bullets into her. She thrashed about with her trunk for a long time before finally dying.

These are wild animals, not dogs, and I would like to appeal to my readers to have nothing to do with live animal acts. I mean wild animals, this does not apply to domesticated animals like dogs, cats and, horses.

From east Africa came news of genocide. There had been a civil war in the nation of Rwanda between the two main ethic groups; the Hutu, who tended to be short and stocky and the Tutsi, who tended to be tall. It began with the assassination of the president of the country.

In April 1995, news came of the devastating terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The really devastating part came a few days later when the stunning headlines informed us that the central character in the bombing was from Niagara County, Tim McVeigh.

He had rented a truck and made it into one massive bomb. McVeigh had been stopped while driving for a traffic infraction and had been identified when an axle from the bomb truck was recovered and it had an identification number on it. This allowed authorities to trace where and to whom it had been rented.

McVeigh was ultimately executed at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, by lethal injection. His execution was on June 11, 2001, exactly three months before the 9/11 attack. I wonder what he would have thought of 9/11.

A cult released nerve gas into a Tokyo subway. Also in Japan, the city of Kobe was devastated by an earthquake.

It was in 1995 that I first visited The Basilica of Father Baker in Lackawanna, a southern suburb of Buffalo. It was like the local version of a European cathedral.

In the summer of 1995, I took my first trip back to England in fifteen years. Some friends who had relatives in London told me that they were going and since school was out for the summer and I had enough money for a ticket, I went along. The flight was going to Gatwick Airport in London, rather than to the larger Heathrow. But I decided to go to my native Gloucestershire rather than remaining with them in London.

Even though southern England was in the midst of an uncharacteristic heat wave, I was delighted to walk around the place where I was born. I walked the length of Lydbrook one day and up the steep hill to Worrall Hill. No matter where I live, this is where I entered the world.

I went to Oxford one day and did a tour in those open double-decker buses. I went to France through the English Channel Tunnel, which had opened the year before. It was a shopping trip to the Citi Europe Mall just outside Calais.

I could speak enough French to get by. After looking around the mall, I walked around nearby neighborhoods. There was an old fort near the mall which appears as if it was built to face against England during Napoleonic days. I really liked France.

England itself was doing well. A number of people who had moved away to other countries had returned home.

The flight back was the best flight I have ever had. I had a window seat and we had a magnificent view of Ireland on a clear, sunlit day. The small farms across the country appeared mostly as a bright green from the plane. It is easy to see why Ireland is dubbed The Emerald Isle.

When we neared the end of the flight, we passed over Toronto and also got an excellent view. Years earlier, Pope John Paul had opened a church outside Toronto with gold domes. I saw those domes reflecting brilliantly in the sunlight. We were flying at the same altitude as those fluffy cumulus clouds when I recognized the Yorkdale Shopping Centre alongside Highway 401 down below.

There was a strong separatist movement in the Canadian province of Quebec. Efforts to compromise, such as officially recognizing Quebec as a "distinct society", due to it's French language and culture, had failed. I had read the very interesting book Oh Canada, Oh Quebec about the crisis.

There was a referendum in Quebec in the autumn of 1995. This was a vote to determine whether Quebec would remain in Canada or become a separate country. The result was close but it was to remain as a part of Canada. I do not know how much effect it had, but I spent part of the evening doing a special prayer that Canada would remain intact.

Around this time, I saw one of the most amazing sights that I have ever seen. I was on River Road in North Tonawanda one evening heading back toward Niagara Falls. A source of brilliant blue light crossed the sky heading southward. It was higher than the clouds and illuminated the tops of the clouds. The light lasted a few seconds and continued southward.

The next day, I read that it had been a meteor. One can see occasional "falling stars" on any clear night, but I have never seen anything like this.

By 1995, it was no longer possible to ignore computers. The word "cyberspace" was everywhere. There was a really great new system being touted that was supposed to bring the power of computers and the internet to everyone. It did just that.

This new system was called Windows 95. It was the latest operating system produced by Microsoft. In my opinion, Windows 95 was the real beginning of the internet revolution. I began learning to use a computer and find my way around the internet.

I found out that the ship, The Empress of England, which we had crossed the ocean on thirty years before, was sold for scrap metal in 1975 to feed the steel mills in Taiwan.

In 1996, a new group seized power over most of Afghanistan, displacing the warlords who had fought the Soviets and the Afghan Communists. They were supposedly some strict Islamic students who were known as the Taliban.