I can remember so well those oh so boring history classes at school

The tattered old books on ancient history

Handed down from generations ago

Reflecting the age of the stories they told

Uninspiring stories told by weary burned out teachers

It was so hard back then to understand the relevance of it all

When later classes focused on modern history

Something grabbed my attention

A detailed analysis of the Cuban missile crisis

Brought back the taste of fear

Images of hiding under my school desk at seven years old

Daily drills on sheltering from a possible nuclear attack

I really believed we we all going to die back then

Remembering vividly when Kennedy was shot

It felt like the King of my world was no longer there to protect me

I can now look back over my lifetime of personal historical moments

Popular music and the Beatles

Armed struggles in Northern Ireland

Graduating from college

My first job

The Vietnam war

One small step for a man but one giant leap for mankind

Buying my first house

The birth of my daughter and my son

My first computer

The start of the internet 

Seeing the falling of the Berlin Wall

War in the Falklands and Margaret Thatcher

Liverpool FC winning the European Cup

Plane hijackings and harrowing terrorist attacks

911 and desperately trying to pick up my kids from school in Manhattan

Seeing my kids graduate from college

Entering retirement

In January 2021 I saw a chilling live news broadcast

An angry mob marching towards the US Capital

Breaking through barriers and storming the building

Those images are burned into my memory banks

No doubt historians are now writing stories about it all

For the enlightenment of future generations

History is the the study of past events

Be them millenniums or minutes ago

We must all learn from them