There are days that change the course of your life forever. If you ask my mom and dad, they might say the birth of their children, the death of their parents or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
For me, it's Sept. 20, 2017, when Hurricane Maria made landfall on my native island of Puerto Rico.
I had a trial run decades earlier, on Sept. 18, 1989, with Hurricane Hugo. As a kid, I thought it was exciting, and the good kind of scary, to follow the hurricane's path and wonder what a direct hit from a Category 5 storm would be like.