I’m old enough to remember the day Kennedy was shot. Also blurry Neil Armstrong’s echoing, static-y words amped all the way from the Moon. I was pinned up against a playground chain link fence when we heard that our President had fallen; an episode of Bewitched was pre-empted so we could all watch Neil Armstrong step live into our living rooms and onto the Sea of Tranquility; I was two minute licking a horse at Pimlico when the Twin Towers fell, the dark news passing from jockey to jockey like a sick game of Telephone. I remember sitting in classrooms at Cornell that had been damaged by Viet Nam War and Civil Rights protestors.

My parents and grandparents also remembered—Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the signing of day Treaty of Versailles, the day women were first allowed to vote.

Reel back the centuries. Every one of our ancestors would remember a handful of events that changed the world and people’s lives forever, each remembered personally as a specific time and place.

Where were you when Donald Trump won the election? I promise you will remember what you were doing that day the United States took its first giant leap into the Sea of Chaos.