Certain moments in time are burned into the memory banks.

Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump will likely take its place alongside a long and growing list of such moments, most marking tragedies or near-tragedies.

It depends upon your age, as to where those start.

For me it was third grade teacher Mrs. Roach, late coming back from lunch break on a November Friday, with the terrible news that President Kennedy had been shot just down the road in Dallas. Following in quick succession were the gunning down of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and then the national day of mourning and no school on Monday.

Less than five years later there were the dual shooting deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy just two months apart, forever making us question what the heck was wrong with our country.

That was a really tough year, as our family was on the grounds of Hemisfair in San Antonio to witness when one of the monorails crashed nearby and one person died.

Though the intervening memory of the deaths of three astronauts on the launching pad as the Apollo program ramped up is less specific, as a fan of the space program, it still marked one of those moments for me.

More space tragedies are also unforgettable, particularly the crashes of the two shuttles, the first which nearly caused me to pull to the side of the road as the eerie broadcast was replayed on the radio news channel, and the second while realizing later in the day that I had heard that sonic boom as the shuttle descended over Texas.

Gathering in the publisher’s office to see the aftermath of the attempt on President Reagan still resonates, along with the inimitable voice of Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football telling much of America of the murder of John Lennon.

There are other local tragedies which I will not try to recount, including awful traffic crashes and one particular story of a military helicopter crash in which 10 soldiers died that I did not cover but directed our efforts in that week’s paper and the aftermath.

And of course, 9-11, the day of infamy for those of us who were not around in 1941 for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

That’s what popped into my head over just a few minutes. I’ll defer from trying to dig deeper. No need. I hope I’ve missed a few and am glad about that.

Each of us has similar personal remembrances.

This latest attempt at political assassination just adds more evidence that our nation still has much work to do. Books will be, and have been, written about the myriad ways we could solve this. I’ll not jump into any of those debates at this time. Others will do that ad nauseam.

It’s a path I’d hoped we had gotten past, which just makes the grief even more acute.

What this means for our country is anybody’s guess. It just reinforces the notion that those in the arena risk it all. It shouldn’t be that way.