My best friend died in a car accident when I was 16.
There was no counselling for that type of thing in those days. Looking back, I really could have used some.

Martin Luther King assassination. I was 8 years old, going to Fruitvale Elementary School in Oakland California. They told us to go home, the Black Panthers (big in Oakland/Bay Area at the time) were going to start rioting.

They just let us go, bunch of kids be-bopping down the street, walking down the streets going home. Would never happen these days. We would have been on lockdown. No rioting.

Second would be 1975, me and my two Brothers came home to find out our Mother killed herself. Whole life changed after that. Life moves forward and you grow up quick.

As a Junior in high school I rode the bus to school from the Air Force base. One of the kids that lived on the other side of the base, where the enlisted airmen and families lived was a friend. We sat together and talked about teenage boy stuff. He was really wanting a motorcycle, and working on his parents to let him have one since the license age was 14. He wanted to ride it to school, and how cool that would be. It got me to wanting a motorcycle as well. Later in the year, his parents relented and allowed him to ride it to school, and the school had a motorcycle parking area.

It was not more than a month later, he tried to make a turn on a divided highway, across the road and wanted to beat a truck coming the other way. There was some gravel on the turnaround, and he went down, and the semi ran right over him and killed him right in front of our school bus full of kids. The bus driver had to use a different place to turn, but he just took us to school as usual. On the Friday afternoon "pep" rally for the football game the principal did make an announcement that my buddy was killed in an traffic incident. The was all. No memorial service, not one counselor, life goes on.

I decided I did not want a motorcycle at all after that. I have not changed my mind.