I came up with a few — surfacing from a nightmare of my father’s voice screaming at my mother, only to slowly realize it was really happening; watching the rabbi tear a piece of my mother’s blouse during a mourning ritual at my grandmother’s funeral, on a scorching July 4 in Tel Aviv; and, embarrassingly, even the college marching band trip back from losing the Rose Bowl, when we arrived at home and realized none of us remembered the take off or landing.

Today, in the car, I remembered that I had wanted to write a story detailing one of these events, or possibly a better, more interesting one if it came to mind. I had to laugh. Nobody need rack his or her brains for surreal events anymore.

When I was a teenager, obsessed with the 60s, I used to long for something “big” to happen in my time. The romanticism of riots, the Vietnam montages set to CCR and CSNY, completely overpowered the few first-hand accounts I had heard from those who lived through that period. I could not believe parts of it were that awful, and, even if they were, it was at least something. People had beliefs, especially young people; they were opinionated and rebellious. These passions eluded me and my peers in high school. We resorted to writing for “underground” papers railing against conformity in general; we generally conformed by listening to Nirvana. Life was serene, suburban and, if you asked us, rotten to the core.

We grew up, a little. We remembered great events together from our shared childhoods: the Challenger, the Berlin Wall coming down, Desert Storm — all the while mimicking our parents’ phrases about JFK: “Where were you when”?”

We tried to find meaning in those markers, something other than an X to define us. We watched footage of Di’s crash and cried and never saw the end of Saturday Night Live that night. But we were never changed by it, not collectively. And we never experienced the magnitude of change in our country that our parents and their parents did.

So we watched Die Hard 1-3, Terminator’s scenes of nuclear winter, The Matrix and its video game universe. We “chatted” and “IM”‘d. Bosnia came and went, Chechnya too. Albright cancelled as our commencement speaker to make peace somewhere. Bombs dropped on Iraq — again. We left college and went out into the world.

This past Memorial Day, I was at home with my parents, who were watching government ceremonies and tributes on TV. I scoffed at the armed forces medley, I snorted at “God Bless America.” “Don’t you have any patriotism?” My dad asked, dismayed. “Not really,” I said. He remembered his uncle coming home from the war. My mother talked about Israel’s Memorial Day, when the country literally stops at a siren call, and motorists get out of their cars to observe a silence. She remembered her little playmate’s apartment building being bombed in the 1948 war. What do I remember? Not even the assassination attempt on Reagan — I was 4.

I don’t have to write about my surreal moment. It’s not mine, it’s ours. Something “big” finally did happen, and I’m so sorry I ever asked. As we stood, staring at the TV, our hearts stopping in disbelief, I could hear conversations not yet begun, voices in the future, asking: “Where were you when “?”