Safety first

My friend Chuck Hite took this picture of me in the WMBG studio in the 1960s.

I worked my way through college as a rock jock.

My job was a dream come true for a 1960s college kid: I went to class in the morning and then presided every afternoon over a top-rated rock-and-roll radio show on Richmond's WMBG. Sometimes my 3-to-7 p.m. program was rated No. 1, and sometimes it was No. 2, as upstart WMBG and its venerable competition, WLEE, battled for supremacy.

Until I left the station to join the U.S. Air Force in 1966, life seemed to be as good as it could get. There were billboards all over Richmond advertising my show. Record stores had printed copies of the Don Dale Top Ten on their counters. And the experience I was gaining was to stand me in good stead for the rest of my career. My tenure as a rock jock spanned the years from pop rock to the British invasion, from the Supremes and the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

They were heady times, but I was reminded last weekend of at least one occasion when my budding career was almost snatched away from me – and it was my own fault. You'll recall that this month "Saturday Night Live" began its 35th season with an unexpected bang. New cast member Jenny Slate dropped the F-bomb – the last of the words that are really forbidden on network TV. I had my own F-bomb moment on WMBG radio about 45 years ago.

It was one of those times when I meant to say something one way, and it came out another. The National Highway Safety Commission was actively promoting the use of seatbelts, which were a fairly new feature. The station supported the effort, and there were two standard ways of wording the message. You could remind listeners to "fasten your seat belts" or you could urge them to "buckle up for safety." You guessed it: I conflated the two messages and urged my audience to "fuckle up for safety."

The program director took me to the woodshed about that one, but – mercifully – he didn't fire me.

I said something else that raised eyebrows a few months later when I accidentally dropped a piece of copy about a new movie playing at the old Loew's Theater. I knew I was going to be off-mike for a few seconds while I reached down to retrieve the copy. I meant to say "play among yourselves while I pick up the spot copy," but what I told my audience to do instead was "play with yourselves ..."

Yep. Another trip to the woodshed. But my career survived.

My own ambition almost burned me a few years later. It wasn't something I said. It was something I did. WLEE had an opening for a newscaster. I was majoring in journalism at the University of Richmond, so I applied for the news job with the competition. I auditioned. They liked what they heard. They offered me a job. I gave two weeks notice at WMBG and called WLEE to say I'd accept the new job. Two days later, WLEE pulled the rug out from under me: "Sorry, Don, but we've decided not to hire you after all."

Hat in hand, I made an appointment to see WMBG's owner, Wilbur Havens. I told him what happened and that I'd really like to have my old rock-jock job back. Mr. Havens thought for a moment and made a very practical business decision. "You can have your job back, Don. It'll save me the cost of taking down all those billboards with your face on them."

It was some weeks before I realized that rock-and-roll radio wasn't all fun and games. It was a cut-throat business. WLEE had outmaneuvered me. The best way for them to eliminate my show as competition was to screw me royally. Which they did. But they hadn't counted on Wilbur Havens and his tightfisted decision about those billboards with my face on them. My career survived.

A fateful pair of shoes

I took this picture of CenterStage last week. The marquee for the performing arts center is at the far end of the block. CenterStage now incorporates much of what was once Thalhimers Department Store.

The opening this month of Richmond's CenterStage performing arts center reminded me of why my mother stopped shopping at Thalhimers.

For much of the last century, shopping in downtown Richmond meant a visit to either Thalhimers or Miller & Rhoads or both. The two large department stores, each occupying nearly a full block on Broad Street, were separated only by 6th Street. CenterStage now occupies the block where Thalhimers once stood. (With the rise of suburban malls, the two flagship downtown stores struggled to stay in business. Miller & Rhoads closed in 1990, and Thalhimers shut its doors for good in 1992.)

Thalhimers shared a corner of its block with Loew's Theater, a grand movie palace that closed in 1979. It was reopened in 1983 as the Virginia Center for the Performing Arts and was later renamed the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts. The Carpenter Center closed in 2004, and following a renovation and restoration it reopened as CenterStage, now incorporating much of the old Thalhimers store.

But back to the story of why my mother stopped shopping at Thalhimers. In 1943, I was about two years old, and my mother decided I needed a new pair of shoes. Shoes were rationed during the war, so with her ration coupons in hand, she looked at what was available at both Miller & Rhoads and Thalhimers. She settled on a pair from Thalhimers.

Two weeks later, the shoes got wet and the soles came apart. Back to Thalhimers she went. The clerk who had sold her the shoes offered to refund the purchase price but said she couldn't return the ration coupon. Without the ration coupon, my mother couldn't buy replacement shoes. So she began working her way up the chain of command. The department's buyer also told her he couldn't return her coupon. The store manager gave her the same response. So my feisty mother decided to take her request to the very top – to Mr. Thalhimer himself. She camped in Mr. Thalhimer's secretary's office until he agreed to see her. She told me it was a long wait.

Once she explained her problem, Mr. Thalhimer relented. He gave her back her money and her ration coupon. My mother then walked across 6th Street to Miller & Rhoads, where she bought me another pair of shoes. And she vowed never to return to Thalhimers. As far as I know, she never did.

Our family's relationship to Miller & Rhoads was to endure for many years. When my sister and I were old enough to care for ourselves, my mother went to work – at Miller & Rhoads. She worked there until retirement – first selling linens and then selling women's sportswear. As a teenager, I too worked at Miller & Rhoads, first as a stock boy and then in men's furnishings. The store awarded me a scholarship when I was a freshman at the University of Richmond.

Ironically, I used some of my earnings from my job at Miller & Rhoads to buy a pair of athletic shoes from Thalhimers. Miller & Rhoads didn't carry the brand I wanted. I never told my mother where I'd bought them. She would have been appalled.

Those Thalhimers athletic shoes lasted for a good 10 years.

St. Wolfgang and the Schafberg

I am indebted to Walter Foery for the images of our trip up to the top of the Schafberg. See the previous post for details.

Atop Fräulein Maria's mountain

Today is my best friend Walter Foery's birthday. Walter, whom I've known since the 1960s, is one of my favorite traveling companions. That's him on the left and me on the right in 2002 at the top of Fräulein Maria's mountain, the Schafberg, near St. Wolfgang, Austria. If you've ever seen "The Sound of Music," you'll remember when Fräulein Maria and the von Trapp children rode a cog railway train to the top of a mountain, where she taught them how to sing. I'm not certain where the scenes at the top of the mountain were shot, but I do know that the cog railway train they rode is the one that starts in St. Wolfgang and goes to the top of the Schafberg. We rode the train on a fine summer's day and spent an hour or so taking pictures of the mountains and grabbing a bite to eat at a mountaintop restaurant. Walter took this picture on the terrace using his camera's self-timer.

St. Wolfgang is one of the most beautiful areas I've ever visited, one I'd like to return to someday. And if I ever do, I hope Walter is available to accompany me.

Birthday cakes past and present

Co-workers made several dozen of these cupcakes, using my late mom's icing recipe, for my birthday yesterday.

I never thought I'd be posting a recipe here, but yesterday's birthday reminded me of one of my favorites. Actually, it's not mine. It was my mom's recipe for the icing she made for my birthday cake every year until she stopped cooking in her late 80s. After the family who came home for my birthday dwindled, she'd insist that I take the leftover cake with me. The next day, I'd take it to work and share it with co-workers at coffee break. Several of them asked for the recipe, and in 1991, she wrote it out for me to give to them.

Yesterday, a dozen or so of my co-workers had a small celebration for me, and three of my colleagues -- Jane Fuquay, Haley McCall and Suzanne Hall -- made cupcakes using my mom's recipe. It was a thoughtful thing for them to do, and the cupcakes brought back many memories. So here it is, the first in a rare series of recipes for the blog. (Later, I might post her recipe for spoonbread, which is another old favorite.)

Mary Helen Nichols Dale's Raisin-Coffee-Nut Frosting
(from a handwritten recipe, 1991)

3 tbs softened butter
1/2 c confectioners sugar
1/4 t salt
1-1/2 c confectioner's sugar
3 tbs hot, strong coffee
1/2 c raisins, chopped
1/2 c pecans chopped
1/2 c coconut, shredded

Cream butter. Add 1/2 cup sugar. Add salt, raisins, nuts and coconut. Add 1-1/2 cups sugar alternately with coffee and beat until smooth and easy to spread. (You might need to add a few extra drops of coffee. This can be hard on a mixer. I do it all by hand.)

Frosts a 2-layer cake. Use any spice-cake recipe for cake or a good spice-cake boxed mix.

A birthday remembrance

Every generation tells stories about important milestones in their lives. When I was a child, the iconic stories I heard repeatedly were about the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, World War II, and FDR's death. They were things that either happened before I was born or that I was too young to remember. Where were you when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? What were you doing when you heard that Franklin Roosevelt had died?

My generation did the same thing, but the questions were different. Where were you when JFK was shot? Where did you watch the moon landing live on TV? How did you first hear about the 9/11 attacks?

There will be time later to talk about Nov. 22, 1963, and July 20, 1969. But it seems appropriate this week to answer question No. 3: How did I first hear about the 9/11 attacks?

I wrote a piece for Style Weekly that answers the question, and it was published a week after 9/11. Here it is:

9/11.

It used to be a date with only happy associations for me. September 11 is my birthday.

But the happy associations were stripped from the date forever a week ago today.

I had taken the day off to celebrate, to stay at home and read a good book. Maybe even two books. I never got the chance.

Instead, I learned how important an on-line community can be.

I began my birthday by sleeping late. But by 8:30 I was up and watching "Today." At about 8:45, I decided to check my e-mail. There were about 30 messages that had come in overnight.

No, I don't have a lot of friends and business associates who are on-line obsessives. But I belong to an e-mail discussion group devoted to words and writing. There are more than 1,000 members of the group worldwide, representing most of the planet's English-speaking countries and some that are not. It's a civilized group. What else would you expect from a bunch of word people?

A lot of the overnight e-mails were birthday greetings. The group has a birthday monitor who sends out reminders, and good wishes from Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and other places on the opposite side of the globe had come in while I was asleep. By this time it was about 9:15, and I was vaguely aware of hearing Katie Couric and Matt Lauer on the TV in the other room. I wondered idly what they were talking about, but I wasn't paying attention.

Then came a terse e-mail from a group member at the University of Delaware: does anybody know what's going on? A moment later, there was another e-mail from the East Coast: I just turned on CNN and started to cry immediately.

What? Cry? Wait. I walked into the living room to see what Matt and Katie were reporting.

Five minutes later, I was typing my own message to the group: Oh dear God. Those poor people.

I spent the next few hours in two chairs no more than 20 feet apart, one in front of the TV and one in front of the PC. The TV showed me what was going on. The PC provided a network of friends to remind me that I wasn't really alone.

From a group member in Canada: I am sitting here in Montreal, with CNN on. This is just about the most frightening thing I have seen... I am completely stunned. From a member on Martha's Vineyard: Happy birthday. Won't forget this one soon, I guess. I'm stunned. From a member farther west: We'll never feel safe again. My God. From a member in Northern Virginia: From my window, I can see black smoke billowing from the direction of the Pentagon. And from a member in Edinburgh, Scotland: Sympathy to all, especially New York... Hope everyone's OK.

Anguished messages and expressions of solidarity poured in from the U.S. and around the world. Like countless others, I didn't know whether to cry or be angry. Then I sent a message of my own: I'm sitting at home alone watching TV as this horror unfolds. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for the sense of community that [this group] is providing... Thanks to you all, I don't feel quite so alone right now. From the other side of the world came a response: Same here in Taipei, with only TV news and tied up telephone networks.

It continued all morning and well into the afternoon. We virtually held each other's hands and hugged each other electronically. The word people provided a new kind of solace in the digital age.

Then came the message from abroad that pushed me over the edge: A longtime lurker, stunned with what I saw in TV, I want to pass to all of you in US the words of admiration expressed in our media by people who are close to the scene; admiration for the permeating sense of commonness among the people who are there. I feel the same when I read the posts from US-ian [friends]. My thoughts are with you. Grzegorz, in cold and shocked Krakow, Poland.

Grzegorz, whose name I couldn't even pronounce, who had been reading our messages to improve his English, whose own country had been through so much more in recent years than we lucky "US-ians" had endured, was offering up his admiration for us in our time of unspeakable horror.

That, finally, made me cry.

I've seen a lot of things come and go in my 59 years on the planet, but I've never before been comforted at a time like this by people whose faces I've never seen and probably never will see.

Welcome to the digital age, Don.

And to a new definition of family.
-30-

9/10/09 PS: A couple of years ago, in early September, I was at Jean-Jacques Bakery in Carytown picking up some rolls. There were two people in line in front of me, an older woman about my age and a young woman in her 20s. An elderly woman was in line behind me. I heard the first woman tell the clerk she needed a birthday cake for her husband. "He was born on Sept. 11, so I try to do something special for him now." The younger woman chimed in. "My father was born on Sept. 11, and he really hates it that 9/11 now means something so tragic." I couldn't resist joining the conversation. "I feel the same way about sharing my birthday with the attacks."

Then the elderly woman behind me piped up. "My birthday is Dec. 7. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on my birthday, it really made me angry. But I have some advice for you. As the years go by, you get over it. You realize it's still your day. No matter what, it's your birthday."

She was right.

Deciding on a career at age 10

Movie cowboy Monte Montana lassoes President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the newly inaugurated president watches the parade in front of the White House on Jan. 20, 1953. This image was on every TV newscast and in every paper I saw the next day. I pasted the picture in my new "career" scrapbook.

At age 10, most people don't have a clue about how they want to spend their working lives. I was lucky. I knew.

I remember listening to the GOP national political convention on a radio at the cottage on the Rappahannock where we went every summer. That would have been 1952. I knew I wanted to be part of the excitement someday. Six months later, when Ike took office in January, I started making scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. The image above was one I saved; everybody was talking about what Monte Montana had done. (The Secret Service would never let him get away with it today.) I filled a half-dozen scrapbooks before my next "career-development initiative."

When I was about 12, I wrote to James Jackson Kilpatrick, the editorial page editor of the Richmond News Leader, which was then the afternoon daily. Already I was thinking about what I'd need to know. "What should I study in college?" I wrote. To my surprise, Kilpatrick wrote back promptly. His advice was sound: study the language and journalism, but get a liberal arts education. Take courses in everything that interests you. The broader your education, the better will be your reporting. I followed his advice, but there were a few twists.

A few years later, in my first year at Hermitage High School, I read a notice in the newspaper that McGuire V.A. Hospital was looking for volunteers, and one of the areas that had openings was the hospital's closed-circuit radio station. It wasn't journalism, but it was broadcasting, and I saw an opportunity. A friend of mine and I volunteered to do a live music program. The head of the hospital's Special Services Department agreed to give it a shot.

It was valuable experience. The music we played for the veterans - they could listen through bedside speakers, but we had no idea how many actually did - was their music, mostly 1930s and 1940s songs. Over the course of many months, I learned much about the music of my parents' generation. I was flat-out awful as a deejay at first. Ego prompts the start of most radio and TV careers, and mine was no exception. I was more enamored of the sound of my own voice than I was interested in actually communicating. It took years for me to work past the ego and into the desire to really say something of interest. But I had an early start, I was getting a leg up, and I was still a high school sophomore.

I signed up for journalism when I was a junior at Hermitage and had the great good luck - and timing - to have a very good teacher, Marjorie Webb. (She later quit teaching and began writing for the Times-Dispatch. She was named editor of what was then called the Woman's Page. Then she returned to teaching.) She insisted that we students hew to the basics of good journalism, but she let us have a free hand with story ideas and writing style. I wrote one story about a classmate who had cleaned her dead cat's bones and put them back together as a skeleton. The T-D picked it up. It was the first time my byline appeared in a professional publication, but to this day I think the whole skeleton thing was truly weird.

My writing was amateurish, but Marjorie Webb helped me hone it. For the next two years I worked on the school paper, and by my senior year I was news editor.

At the University of Richmond, I started taking journalism courses in earnest with the great Joe Nettles, who had worked for the Associated Press before joining the UR faculty. He brought in real journalists as guest lecturers, from among his many friends at the Times-Dispatch and the News Leader. We were not only learning from the pros: We were making valuable contacts.

In my sophomore year, I took a part-time job at a new daytime radio station, WIVE, in Ashland. WIVE almost immediately switched formats from middle-of-the-road to rock, and I was offered the morning drive show. It meant getting up in the middle of the night and driving up to Ashland, but I took the assignment without hesitating. I was at WIVE in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. We all gathered in the studio to listen to the president's speech and the news coverage that followed for days. Those were scary times, perhaps the scariest of my youth.

Six months later, I got an offer from a higher-rated station, Richmond's No. 2 rocker, WENZ, which operated out of studios next to a beauty parlor in Highland Springs. I'll never forget the mandatory station ID: "On the air with music 24 hours a day, Greater Richmond's great, new, music station, the new W-E-N-Z in Highland Springs. It's WENZ!"

The program director who hired me at WENZ was still young himself, maybe 21 or 22, but he knew rock radio and the formula for making it successful. His personal life was something else - a bit of a mess. On one lonely Saturday night at the studio, with no company except the occasional sound of laughter bleeding in from the beauty parlor next door, I was happily spinning Top 40 records when the program director's girlfriend came into the studio. She was distraught. The program director had dumped her. She ranted and raved ... while I played records. When I had to open the mike to talk, she dutifully shut up. But the minute the mike was off, she was back into her diatribe. It was crazy trying to do a live radio show and deal with her too.

After exhausting her emotional outburst, she went to the bathroom adjacent to the studio. I gave her the standard warning: Don't flush while the mike is open.

She didn't. There was no noise at all. And she didn't come out.

After about 5 minutes, I was concerned. I knocked on the bathroom door, but she didn't answer. I carefully opened the door, and saw her sitting on the floor in the corner making cuts on her wrist with a razor blade. Her eyes were wide open, her face was ghostly pale, and she said one word: "Help."

I took off my T-shirt and wrapped it around her wrist, telling her to hold on. The record I was playing had reached the end of its groove, so I slapped an LP on the turntable. I then called the police, who dispatched an ambulance. My next call was to the program director, telling him that he had 15 minutes before the album ran out. When the ambulance arrived and took her away, I walked out of the door and never went back. Conditions at Greater Richmond's great new music station, W-E-N-Z, were too much for me.

A few months later I spotted another announcement in the newspaper. WCOD FM, part of the Havens and Martin station group that also included WTVR TV and WMBG AM, was looking for an announcer to do station breaks and read local commercials during Baltimore Colts games. I applied, got an audition, and got the job. That was the step that started a 20-year career that led to being news director at WTVR TV, the South's first television station and the top-rated station in Central Virginia.

It all started with newspaper clippings of Ike's inaugural 10 years before, but now I was on my way to a career that I loved.

Charlotte Matilda Delp Nichols

I didn't even know this image existed until last week, when my cousin Mary Francis sent it to me. It's our great-grandmother Charlotte Matilda Delp Nichols. Dating the photograph is hard because there are only a couple of known dates that let us assume a window of opportunity for the image.

It has to have been taken not long before 1892, because that's when Great-grandmother Nichols is believed to have died. The only other date that provides any help is her husband's birth date. He was Ace McClellan Nichols, born in 1865 - the year the Civil War ended - in Yadkin County, N.C. (Ace was the last in the family to be born in North Carolina, before the move to Grayson County, Va.) I don't know when Ace and Charlotte married, but I do know their first son, Horace, my grandfather, was born in 1886. Given all of that, my guess is that the picture was taken circa 1888-1890. But, as I said, that's a guess. We can safely assume she was about her husband's age or younger, so she might have been about 27 when she died and somewhere around 25 when this picture was taken. But rural life was hard in 19th-century Southwest Virginia, so she might be younger than she looks.

The first thing that struck me about the picture is Great-grandmother Nichols' long hair, arranged down the back of her neck and draped across her chest in a cascade well below her shoulders. It must have been a source of great pride for her. She no doubt dressed to have her picture taken, which could not have been an everyday occasion. Her dark dress covers her from high on her neck to the ground. Not even her feet are visible. On her bare right hand is a ring. A wedding ring? If so, it's not on the hand we'd expect it to be on today. Maybe the wedding ring -- if that's what it is -- was not made for her, and maybe she wore it on the finger on which it fit. There are so many possibilities. And on her left hand, she wears a glove. Where is the other glove? We might expect it to be held in her gloved hand, but it's not there. Did she routinely wear her wedding ring on the right hand and a glove on her left? If so, why? Was her left hand misshapened in some way? I'm also assuming that she was gloveless on her right hand because she wanted her ring to be seen.

Given that she dressed up for the picture, we can assume she is standing in front of her own house - although that's pure assumption. If so, it gives us a clue that Ace Nichols and his family had little money. The house speaks of poverty. The porch is held up by stones at the corners, and the house appears to be unpainted. A volunteer seedling tree is sprouting from the ground just in front of her. The fallen leaves where she is standing hint of autumn and the coming to the mountains of hard winter times. Their labors did not go towards landscaping. The house was merely shelter, and all their efforts would have gone into farming and surviving.

I am puzzled about that decorative object she's wearing on her left. I just can't figure out what it is.

After Great-grandmother Nichols died, Great-grandfather Nichols was briefly wedded to Della Ward of Grayson County, but the marriage quickly ended in divorce. In 1898, he married Della's younger sister, Laura Novella Ward.

Without our great-grandmother, none of us in this particular Nichols line would be who we are. I see gentleness in her face, and a life of hard times, a life almost unimaginable today, a life filled with endless work from sun-up to dusk. And yet she moved her generation forward, doing her part to shape what we would be and the opportunities we would have that could only be dreamt of a century ago. I would love to have known her. She would have so many answers that are now lost to time about the struggles of the Nichols family.

The Call Girls

A Day at the Beach, 1955

I love this photograph! (Click on it to enlarge it.) It's so perfect at being what it is that it approaches the status of art. But first, let me identify the people.

They are my cousins, the Call girls. They're the five daughters of my Aunt Louise, who was my mother's younger sister, and Uncle Frank Call. Working clockwise from the top left, they are Eleanor (Ellie), Mary Francis, Charlotte Marie (Boo), Rebecca Ann (Becky) and Donna Lynn.

Mary Francis e-mailed me this image a few days ago, and I've been drawn back to it over and over. It was taken at my Uncle Joe's beach cottage in 1955. Mary Francis either inadvertently or purposefully gave it the title "A Day at the Beach, 1955" in the subject-line of her e-mail. It works for me.

The amused look that Ellie is giving Mary Francis makes her seem like a lovely imp, but perhaps wise beyond her years. Mary Francis has adopted a direct stare into the lens and an attitude reminiscent of some forgotten 1930s movie about louche women. You can see in Charlotte's face that she knows this is serious business -- having one's picture taken -- and that a smile is in order. Becky's demeanor is priceless: She finds the process more interesting than the result will be. And Donna fidgets, wondering why this is taking so long.

Those are all suppositions and imaginings on my part. But that's what makes the photograph noteworthy. So much is going on, and we'll all see something different.

The Call sisters were an important part of my childhood. My mother and their mother were the only two of the Nichols siblings to have children, and our two families, the Dales and the Calls, visited back and forth regularly.

Old family photographs are imbued with totemic power. They remind us of who we were once. During my childhood, photographs often marked special occasions, even though the occasions might now be lost to time. I have a photograph of me in my Sunday best, about 8 or 9 years old, with a flower on my lapel. I found it in a box in my mother's bedroom closet when I was cleaning out her house the year before she died. Today, I have zero memory of what occasion was marked by the flower. Was it Mothers Day? Easter? Was it 1950? 1949?

The act of photographing was, itself, once a special occasion. Mary Francis has an image of Great-grandmother Nichols that I had never seen before this week. Dressed head to toe in severe black, she faces the camera with that determined, stern expression so typical of turn-of-the-century portraits. I have another of my mother -- she looks to be about 18 -- at Buckroe Beach. She is sitting on the sand, smiling brilliantly, with her head tossed back and cocked towards the camera. One leg is straight and the other bent. It is a glamour pose, and I find it oddly embarrassing to think of my mother that way. My guess is that it's something she saw in a movie magazine.

A few generations later, the technology has changed and cameras are ubiquitous. We use digital cameras and even hi-def video to record moments from our lives and then post the results on the Web for faraway (and local) parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts to see. (I document vacations sometimes to the extent that I know I'd enjoy where I was much more if I'd just put the camera away.)

But I am grateful for the old and the new photographs. Someday, a generation to come will find some of today's images and, perhaps, spend time imagining what occasion their long-gone relatives were marking and what they were thinking at that moment frozen in time.