On March 26th, 2002 I emailed my mom and dad a link to http://www.frontiernet.net/~cdm/age1.html. 1 My mom replied to me and said:

David,

That was SOOOOOOO cool! I looked at all of them and printed them out just because they were so cool!
Makes you think – at least at my age….

I love you lots! Call me tomorrow if you can.

Mom

The link is for a silly little page with a JavaScript alert box that asks for your birthday. Then it calculates how old you were at a few of the important events in history.

For my mom’s birthday — September 22nd, 1948 — it told me this about her:

You said your birthday is 9 / 22 / 1948 which means you are 63 years old and that you were:

52 years old at the time of the 9-11 attack on America
51 years old on the first day of Y2K
48 years old when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash
46 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing
45 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder
44 years old at the time of the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center
42 years old when Operation Desert Storm began
41 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall
37 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded
35 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh
34 years old during Sally Ride’s travel in space
32 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.
31 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began
27 years old on the U.S.’s bicentennial Fourth of July
25 years old when President Nixon left office
23 years old when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot
20 years old at the time the first man stepped on the moon
19 years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated
16 years old during the Watts riot
15 years old at the time President Kennedy was assassinated
10 years old when Hawaii was admitted as 50th of the United States
9 years old when the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 was launched
4 years old at the end of the Korean War

It’s really, really surreal to think that my mom was younger than I am now when the Challenger exploded. I remember that day quite vividly. My sister and I had both stayed home sick from school and were in the front yard of Nana and Papa’s house in Daytona. I ran into the house and told Papa that I thought something was wrong and there was an accident. He told me it was just the boosters separating and everything was fine. Then we turned on the TV and saw the news. We went back into the front yard and watched the rest of the smoke clouds disappearing into the air.

1 I’m astounded that — as of September 7, 2012 — that link still works.