You felt peace, serenity, joy.
You went to the Great Wall of China on the first morning of the Olympics to watch a 152-mile bicycle race.
You traveled 50 miles from the scene of a majestic Opening Ceremony to get there, having just seen Beijing make a sweet first impression.
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You watched more than 100 bikes swoosh by, breaking away past checkpoints like the north gate of the Temple of Heaven and the Great Hall of the People.
Tiananmen Square just up ahead.
The mood of the city was anything but forbidding. Strangers were treating you with a practiced kindness and charm. Olympic volunteers did not miss a chance to greet you with a hello, whether in your language or theirs.
China, you told yourself, was off to a great start.
It took but a few hours more to intrude on your reverie. A formal statement from the U.S. Olympic Committee flashed onto the screen of your PDA.
Something terrible had happened at a central Beijing landmark called the Drum Tower, due north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.
Two individuals with family ties to a U.S. coach had been stabbed on a Beijing street in broad daylight. One was dead. So was the man with the knife, by his own doing. It had happened a little past noon, practically at the same time that those Olympians in the men’s road race had come whizzing by on 143 bikes.
Your heart sank.
Anxiety and grief already had come to a Games not yet 24 hours old. A host city eager to provide joy to the world had been placed all too abruptly on edge.
You automatically expected everyone in a city with a population of 17 million to feel responsible or be taken to task for the irrational actions of a single man.
You wondered if fear mongers would take pains to portray a moment of random violence as something far more devious — a plot, a pattern, a hidden hatred of your kind.
You worried that visiting dignitaries like the president of the United States and the mayor of Chicago would feel compelled to remind their security detail to stay on high alert.
You could see it being chalked up as Beijing’s ugly international incident, as if it bore a resemblance to a Munich terrorist raid or a pipe bomb being set off in an Atlanta park.
The details were lurid.
A 47-year-old man identified as Tang Yongming was found dead, an apparent suicide, after attacking two Minnesota tourists, Todd and Barbara Bachman, whose daughter is married to the coach of the U.S. Olympic men’s volleyball team.
For reasons unknown, Tang is said to have come at the couple with a knife, killing Todd Bachman and severely wounding his wife. Tang then seems to have gone to the second level of the ancient Drum Tower and leaped from it to his death.
No more ghastly beginning to a new Olympic Games could have been expected or prevented.
By all outward appearances, the crimes seemed without motive, although Chinese and U.S. authorities continue to investigate.
Nevertheless, it couldn’t help but send a shudder through the organizers of the Beijing Olympics, confirming their worst fears. They could not get through a single day without the kind of traumatic event they dreaded most.
A safe Olympics was first and foremost our goal, they had to reiterate to the world.
You felt their pain.
You could imagine a similarly senseless incident taking place in a London or Tokyo train station. You could picture such a thing perpetrated by a Chicago gangbanger or a drug-dealing punk on a beach in Rio.
Only a fool would blame all of Beijing for this. Only a doomsayer could expect the Chinese people to pay a price on the whole, to have a relationship with another land permanently damaged by the inexplicable behavior of one in a billion.
It could happen anyplace. Beijing has no particular history of violent street crime. Olympic cities past and future offer no guarantee of 24/7 safety and goodwill toward all.
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You invite the global community to come pay a visit. You appeal for sanity, beef up security, keep your fingers crossed and have faith in your fellow man.
One of whom will disappoint you every time.
Saturday was supposed to be a day when you woke up with a warm glow, still remembering the Opening Ceremony’s beauty and whimsy of the previous night.
You had a bike race to go to that spirited you away to a glorious place, the Great Wall, where you can seriously contemplate life’s grandeur and enchantment.
By the time you came full circle, though, you understood yet again how quickly the good things in life go downhill.
You can’t stand to see Olympic Games begin like this. You lie awake praying they won’t end like this.
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