I can remember standing in our living room in Regina, Saskatchewan, when the news of the Challenger Shuttle explosion flashed on TV in 1986. I was playing cards with a friend in Victoria, British Columbia, on the night, 11 years later, that we heard Princess Diana had been in a bad car crash. I was just getting up to go to my Tuesday-morning class at Vancouver's University of British Columbia on Sept. 11, 2001.

I had just finished my shift at a bar in Berlin when U.S. troops invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. And I was on my computer, before coming to work in Tokyo on June 26, when I read about Michael Jackson's death. Inevitably, each person has a different string of such events in their heads, which become like time capsules, little breaks where we step out of the everyday and feel connected to something larger, whether we want to or not.