I was not yet born when Pearl Harbor was bombed. So for me, the question, "Do you remember where you were when . . . ?" is imprinted with the shattering moments after President John F. Kennedy was shot.
I was a college student in California. I recall the classroom, the unnatural quiet, the quality of sunlight through the leaves. It was too soon to know what the '60s would mean, that I would go through them as one of "Kennedy's Children."Now, more than 30 years later, when I visit the Kennedy grave sites at Arlington National Cemetery, as I did recently, I come burdened with my own memories.
And as I watch the array of shorts, sneakers and sundresses or the more exotic parade of saris, turbans and linen pantaloons, I ask myself, "Why? What brings them now?"
By the thousands, they stream to this eternal flame, these irregular Cape Cod stones, this simplicity of granite and grass. Like pilgrims, they come in all seasons.
This place and the Vietnam Wall are the most visited sites in the nation's capital.
Over the years, both the Kennedy mystique and era have been revisited, rethought and sometimes vilified. The Kennedy family have been seen as both heroic idols and as flawed humans. But still the pilgrims come to the graves.
Immediately after the death of JFK in November 1963, people started coming here to express their grief. On peak weekends, there were as many as 50,000.
When Robert Kennedy was interred under a simple white cross near his brother's on June 8, 1968, crowds along the route so slowed the funeral train from New York that the burial took place at night - the only night-time service at Arlington. Thousands stood in the dark holding candles.
Last year, after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was buried next to her first husband and their two infants, 20,000 a day came.
Ever since JFK's funeral, military, political and human rights leaders from around the world have come. Russian generals have been seen at the grave site weeping.
Groups, feeling a kinship with a Kennedy program or ideal, come too. Peace Corps volunteers assemble for reunions. Green Berets do too, leaving wreaths in the shape of their berets.
Yet it is not the mighty, but the ordinary, who touch me with their devotion. The Japanese visitor quietly wiping away tears. The George Washington University student who reflects on and renews his decision to study political science. The Iowa woman with a retarded child who finally fulfilled a long desire to visit the graves to honor the Kennedys' work for the re-tard-ed.
I am touched by those who care for this shrine. In the quiet of early morning, groundskeeper Charles Ford dutifully mops marble around the grave site to prepare for the crowds, adding his own ritual to the daily cycle.
Melody Miller, a spokeswoman in Sen. Edward Kennedy's office, tells me that identity with the Kennedy family makes people "reach out in times of love and loss. They feel a bond."
I look at the casually clad and wonder whether a quest for dignity and decorum draws them. Do they yearn for an America marked by energy and youthful idealism? Do we all long for eloquence?
All these are found in the young president and his slain brother's words inscribed in stone.
Yet among those passing by these granite walls are children with no memories of the words or their times. Startling as it is to me, for these children the question is: "So he was the president?"
For their parents, it seems, part of coming here is to pass the torch of history to yet another ge-ner-a-tion.
There is the small boy who accompanies his mother to Robert Kennedy's grave saying, "You mean they shot him?"
There's the little girl helping her father push a baby stroller while reciting, "Ask what I can do for my country."
Visiting here, I experience the strange sense of time passing and time standing still.
But it's not just the children, for whom the '60s are ancient history. It's also those fixed in time as forever young.
The Kennedy baby who died in 1956 would be nearly 40 now. Her father - a president and veteran of World War II - would be 78.
So why do I come here?
Perhaps, like others, to find a thing to hold onto in a transient world. We do not live in the times we once did. We are not the ages we once were. We have not done what we might have done - as even JFK, being mortal, and being flawed, did not.
But there is something here that calls on us to reflect on the best in ourselves, in what we have the power to do.
It calls on us "to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, a struggle against the common enemies of man - tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself."