Lately our family has been having a lot of discussions about “historical moments,” those times when the world sort of stops moving and for the rest of your life you remember exactly where you were and what was happening when you heard “the news.”

Most of it has been inspired by the events of the past few weeks. It started on Jan. 6, after the riots at the Capitol. A teacher friend made the comment that the kids should be watching history unfold.

I was getting news alerts on my phone, but the boys were still in school and I wasn’t really sure that I wanted 10-year-old E getting an eyeful of who knows what.

Of course, the boys having the same phone that I do were also getting alerts and were just as up to speed on what was going on in the world as I was. By the time we gathered around the dinner table, A, the news hound, had already scoured the internet and was more up to speed on the events of the day than either the Wonderful Husband or I was.

A had already contextualized this into another “date which will live in infamy” kind of moment, but due to the fact that he had already been watching the news of the day, and was expecting some kind of news, he didn’t feel like it was going to be one of those “time stands still” kinds of memories for him.

For me, the very first time I had this kind of experience was hearing that John Lennon had been shot. For the record, I don’t think my 7-year-old self even knew who John Lennon was, but as I was riding to school in my dad’s blue Dodge pickup, opening and closing the vent door with my foot, the news came over the radio.

We had just gotten to the corner of Grove Street and Meadow Avenue, the school looming in front of me, and the headline news was that John Lennon had been shot outside his apartment by a fan. I remember this because at the time, a “fan” to me was a device for moving air, and I did not understand how that could have shot someone. It was a lot for a 7-year-old to take in.

A few years later, the Challenger mission that ended tragically was another one of those moments.

That day, I stayed home from school, sick. Although I’d grown up without a television, we’d recently acquired an old one to use in conjunction with our new Texas Instruments computer.

Through the magic of tinfoil and rabbit ears, we were also able to get an ABC channel. My grandmother had always been an aficionado of the ABC soap operas and over the years, I’d picked up enough about them to at least follow the story line enough to relieve the boredom of the day, so I’d tuned in, hoping to catch “Ryan’s Hope.”

Instead, I got the special news bulletin broadcasting the shuttle launch. Seeing that cloud of unexpected smoke and fire against that brilliant blue sky was a memory that would stay with me and be eerily repeated on a day in September 2001.

I should have a memory of the Oklahoma City bombing as well. Many of my contemporaries do, but it was springtime of my senior year in college. My day was spent cocooned in work and classes and a hundred other errands that needed to be accomplished before June.

While I feel sure that I must have heard something about it during the day, it wasn’t until my dad called later that night concerned that he hadn’t heard from me all day, and to warn me about avoiding public places until this was all resolved, that I realized something monumental had happened.

A few years later, I was lucky enough to have a beautiful late summer day off from work. I slept in a little bit, and lazily wandered down to the kitchen to get some breakfast. Coming down the stairs, I heard the phone ring.

Moments later, my dad barked to turn on the television quickly, a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. The two of us spent the rest of the day glued to the television set, in horror. I also spent most of the day dialing and redialing my best friend, who worked in the city. Later that evening, hearing her voice, even though she was still in shock, was one small bright spot in that otherwise awful day.

By the time the next awful event happened, Sandy Hook, in 2012, things had changed. A lot. Cellphones and social media made the acquisition of news, no matter how piecemeal and incomplete, instantaneous. I also had kids of my own. I was at work that day, and as it gradually became apparent that the outcome was going to be unimaginably horrible, my mind conjured all sorts of awful things happening to my own first-grader.

After running through that list, my kids were more than a little upset. “Wow, Mom. A lot of bad stuff has happened in your lifetime,” said one of them. It’s funny, I never really thought about it, but I guess from their perspective it does seem like a lot. Realizing that I was about to send a pack of kids off to bed to have nightmares, and maybe have a few myself, I scrambled. Looking at their concerned faces, it was easy to remember that a lot of good things have happened in my lifetime, too.

It was easy enough to dig into my own archives to find photos of the community gatherings that happened after 9/11, the salutes to our first responders, the unity we all felt. It was important to show them that out of the ashes, things can rise and be better and stronger than they were before, that people can put aside their differences and work toward a better future for everyone.

We’ve been in this position before. Just like the Challenger disaster, although it was a terrible price to pay, we learned from our mistakes, and we rebuilt and headed back to the stars, together. Hopefully, we can do that this time around as well.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.