When great events were happening.

Well...

During the Cuban missile crisis, I was about eight years old. I was on the carpet, playing with toys or reading a BULLWINKLE comic book, my favorite position to watch TV, when President Kennedy came on our black-and-white TV. Huntley and Brinkley followed him, explaining some of the evidence.

I didn't really catch on to what was happening, but I do remember the look on my parents' faces. Worried. I don't know if I've ever seen Pop so worried.

I know these are paranoid times, but I still think even the reality of terrorism hasn't brought back the real paranoia of the fifties and early sixties. Part of New York was destroyed before our eyes, true...

Yet any day now, we knew a slip in international relations could result in New York...disappearing altogether in a great mushroom cloud. We lived with stories like ALAS, BABYLON and FAIL-SAFE. Post-nuclear war tales had become a cliche.

Many of us expected to have to try to live through Ragnarok, hide out in a fall-out shelter through Armageddon.

It still, looking back on it, with the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction---aptly acronymized to MAD---seems near-miraculous that nothing happened.

My father built a fallout shelter in the weeks that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. It later became a patio. Yet, looking back...I don't blame him a bit.

I was ten when President Kennedy was shot. That year many of our classrooms had gotten TVs, to take advantage of the newly opened PBS stations. We had been outside, on the playground...and came in...and everybody was watching the TV in our classrooms. The principal, the vice-principal, the cooks, they were all spread over the various classrooms, listening to Walter Cronkite tell us that the President had been shot.

The young, fun President, the one who could have been our dad, not our granddad like most Presidents---had been shot.

Later that day, we heard he had not just been shot, but had died.

Later---and I can't swear whether we saw it as it happened, or saw the films later---we saw Jack Ruby come up and shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, and realized, no matter what, we would never know....all that was behind it.

We still don't.

It doesn't matter, really. What mattered was the loss. The sense of newness, of optimism, that we lost.

I was fifteen when we walked on the moon. We had graduated to color TV, but the TV images were in black and white. I had been waiting all my life for this moment, the walk on another world...

For science fiction fans, man walking on another world was the Holy Grail.

The pictures were grainy and almost stop-action. My brother thought it looked like a "bad fifties' science fiction flick, shot in a back lot."

Still, it was, and remained, an epiphany. An extremely lucky moment to be alive, to see people walk on another world....

For the very...

First...

Time.

I remember Richard Nixon resigning. I was twenty at the time. I remember feeling very, very satisfied to see him go.

I don't remember what I was doing when the Challenger exploded. I just remember thinking---rightly---that this would probably keep the space program for progressing much for years.

When Mt. St. Helens erupted, I was on my honeymoon, and we were the last people in the world to know about it.

I remember where I was when the Gulf War started. At work, and we were all concerned about a Iraqi woman who worked there, named Balsam---who, as the war progressed, had her family living where there was the greatest concentration of bombing. She did lose one brother, who was conscripted into Saddam's army, during Operation Desert Storm....

Of course, there was this last little incident. I was riding in the car with Barb, listening to Bob And Tom on the radio, when they mentioned something about a jet ramming one of the World Trade Centers. Then, just as we drove up to work, they said another one hit it...

We all knew then.

I walked in, and everybody was in the lobby, watching the big-screen plasma TVs therein. Usually they ran company informercials, but the two World Trade Towers were smoking like immense torches.

Where was I, when the great events of history were happening?

Glued to the boob tube, it seems....

For me, history is a spectator sport. A voyeur's dream. I've seen history enacted on the nightly news so often---that part of me still doesn't believe it's real.