Sometimes there are dramatic events happening around us, that the entire moment when they happened remains stamped indelibly in our memory like a photograph. The well worn phrase is that “you remember exactly where you were when X happened”. It is not quite like that – it goes way deeper. You remember the brand of chewing gum you had in your mouth and what it tasted like. You remember how you were scratching a rash. You remember the barking dog down the street and the old lady with wonky eyes. I, for one, remember the stiff school uniform (mom always scrubbed it to painful perfection) I was wearing when the principal disrupted the reading & writing class and told us to quietly go home and not touch anything at all outside. Not a flower, not a wall, not a dog or cat. I remember the panicky faces I saw on the streets and the wet towels or bed sheets blocking every window in every block. Mom grabbed me harshly by the hand and took me to our family doctor. There was a long line of parents with children. All the adults looked grim and worried, like my mom and all the kids were annoyed and nervous – like me. After all, we were all 5-6 or older 10-12 years old and nobody told us anything. Being given half a day free from school was “di granda”, but being dragged to the doctor’s was no fun at all. Once inside the doctor’s office I was given a pill and told to swallow it at once. It tasted like a candy from hell and left a pinching aftertaste in my mouth. Then the homily began: you do not pick flowers, you do not play with stray dogs or cats, you do not touch walls outside, and preferably you do not go outside at all. After ten minutes of patience (the maximum you can require a 7-year-old) I blurted out for the first in the entire day: “BUT WHY?” That was my experience of the Chernobyl explosion aftermath. 24 years have passed since, but, when I hear the word Chernobyl, I can still feel the stiffness of the uniform upon my skin, and mom grabbing my hand in a strong grasp. And the horrible taste of the Iodine pill. I laugh and cry as I remember the wet sheets in the windows – put there to prevent radiation from entering the apartment – and I realize that we were so lucky. Just when the radioactive cloud came over my country, the wind shifted direction and blew it toward the Baltic and Northern countries. I feel a million emotions and I realize that the whole world was dicing with death during those days, when the difference between being safe and being irradiated depended on the breath of winds and, ultimately, the will of God. Today, of all days, we should remember the dead and the suffering of Chernobyl. We should all send a good thought and an angel of mercy to the displaced people of Pripiat; the elderly still bearing the scars of irradiation; the children born after the explosion and marked for life by horrible malformations; and the brave Russian soldiers who died horrible deaths trying to contain the spreading of the residues. And before we toy around with things we don’t fully understand and can’t control, we should remember Chernobyl.