It reminded me of the same kind of feelings I experienced during 9/11, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the shuttle disasters and the invasion of Iraq.

It made me realize how resilient humanity can be sometimes. It also made me start to ponder the significant events that had occurred in the U.S. and around the globe during this lifetime I’ve been given. I wanted to remember them, and I wanted to remember where I was and what I was doing when these things happened. I don’t have enough room to put everything down here — but here are a few that I can recall pretty clearly.

Martin Luther King assassinated

King was assassinated on Thursday, April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. While standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, King was preparing to lead a local march in support of the mostly black Memphis sanitation workers’ union, which was on strike at the time. Friends inside the motel room heard the shot fired and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the jaw. He was pronounced dead several hours later. The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day.

I can still remember Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news announcing what had happened. At the time, though I was too young to understand who King was, or the significance of his passing. I just knew everyone was upset. In the years to come, I would understand, come to share his values and appreciate the significance his movement would later have on the LGBT civil rights struggle.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War had been raging for several years by the time I popped on the planet. It began in 1957, but the U.S. didn’t get involved until 1965. I can still remember radio and television reports when I was just a very little boy and being deathly afraid that the conflict was somehow going to come here. It didn’t of course. That didn’t prevent me from sending my mom into a screaming rage when I announced to her that I would never fight in such a war and that I would go to Canada before doing so. The U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, and the fighting within the country ended in 1975. By war’s end over 1,100,000 Vietnamese were dead. The American death toll was decidedly less in numbers (287,232), but no less devastating for the survivors.

Richard Nixon resigns

The House Judiciary Committee opened formal and public impeachment hearings against President Nixon on May 9, 1974. Despite his efforts, one of the secret recordings, known as the “smoking gun” tape, was released on August 5, 1974 and revealed that Nixon authorized hush money to Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. In light of his loss of political support and the near certainty of both his impeachment by the House of Representatives and his conviction by the Senate, he resigned August 9, 1974. My sister cried that night, though I couldn’t understand why (I wasn’t a Republican fan even back then). In my mind’s eye I can still see the entire picture: my sister and I laying on her bed together watching this tiny little 12” black and white TV. Years later when I asked her why she was crying, she finally explained it to me — in a way that rings clear today. “It was because everything was changing,” she said. “The country had just got out of Vietnam and there were so many boys my age that had died. Then our president was a criminal and he wasn’t our president anymore. It was like the world was falling apart.”

First signs of the AIDS epidemic

The official date for the beginning of the AIDS epidemic is marked as June 18, 1981, when the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in five gay men in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Originally dubbed GRID, or Gay Related Immune Deficiency, health authorities soon realized that nearly half of the people identified with the syndrome were not gay. In 1982, the CDC introduced the term AIDS (Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndeome) to describe the newly recognized syndrome.

Since 1981, more than 20 million people have died. In 2004 alone, AIDS killed approximately 2.3 million people.

It seems like it was a million years ago, but I can still hear the voice of my co-worker telling me about a story she had seen on the news the night before. “You better be careful, honey. I saw a story on the news last night about gay men getting sick in San Francisco and New York. They’re dropping like flies.”

Her last few words seemed a bit callous to me — but they would prove to be correct over the next two decades.

Space Shuttle explodes

It was January 28, 1986. I walked into the break room of the old downtown Belk department store and everyone was crying. I looked at the TV in the corner of the room and all I could see was a long white plume of smoke. “What happened?” I asked one of my co-workers. “The space shuttle exploded,” she replied between sobs. “They’re all dead.”

Indeed, the space shuttle Challenger had exploded killing all seven astronauts on board.

The five men and two women - including the first civilian in space - were just over a minute into their flight from Cape Canaveral in Florida when the Challenger blew up.

9/11

It’s interesting that those two numbers are all that is required. Four plane crashes. The World Trade Center completely destroyed. The Pentagon severely damaged. Estimated death toll: 2,752.

Just hours prior I had gotten off a Houston to Atlanta flight, rushed home to my partner and tried to grab a few hours of sleep. Early the next morning, before either of us had even ventured from the bed, the phone started to ring, over and over again. Finally I made my way down the hall to the den and picked up the receiver. “Turn on your TV now!” The voice on the other end was my friend Jack, and he sounded on the verge of hysteria. I flipped on the television, and the world has never been the same since.

Note to the readers: We’d love to hear your recollections about how significant world events have impacted on your life. If you’ve got a story to share, email it to us at editor@q-notes.com.