Oh My moments.

We all have them. Moments engraved in our mind's eye and our brain that are so stirring that we simply cannot forget them. Growing up the way I grew up, moving from Air Force station to Air Force station and homes, I've had a few of those moments.Some of them are large moments with large memories. Others had to be sought out, waited for, either in quiet, or heat, or kneeling on the sand being eaten alive by "no see'ums", or in the deep cold of a Virginia winter. Some were meant to happen, kismet.

Perhaps my first recollection of  such a moment occurred when I was four or five years old. Our family was stationed at the time in Oklahoma, so going west was relatively easy. I recall a moment in my mind when my dad drove us out over a great dam ( Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Nevada). It was evening and dark, with a beautiful sky of shimmering stars setting the stage. Out west, unlike where we southerners that live in urban areas and easterners that live in cities experience a dark sky with faded stars, the sky gives up its stars in profusion. Great crowded masses glow and the black sky is ink black. Pearls on a sea bottom, winking at one's eyes.  The dam was gray, and massive, not massive, beyond massive, it had a life of its own. It breathed  under my feet. The dam whirled and hummed and roared. Life broad and wild and large holding my body above Lake Mead and the mighty Colorado.

Water on one side, deep, beyond lake deep, beyond the deep a five year old can imagine, an ocean of  fresh water held back by concrete and iron and steel and wishes and hopes. Men in hard hats with slide rules and a lot of moxie took the physics and calculated and constructed with all the might the human mind could conceive the dragon called Hoover.  It was the biggest little thing my young eyes had ever seen. After all this was the Grand Canyon and man's endeavors are  just that endeavors. The flick of a finger and the spirit of the Lord created a lifetime of erosion and water measured in spirit time. Men drove trucks along steep narrow roads,  many hung by ropes on the walls of a canyon, giving up their energy, and sometimes their lives to build a parapet to supply water to the growing appetite west in California.

Beneath my feet and the concrete the Colorado river water belched from gates nearly 600 feet below. I looked over the precipice in awe, and wonder as the water roared, a white lion in full gait.  And above me, an ink sky, silver dimes, shiny, new, tumbling in my imagination. That is a moment branded in my mind, an OH MY moment. I think there was a moon that night, so much shimmered and shined, so much was alive, and my brain recorded the time and froze it.