ON THE DAY MY INNOCENCE WAS BLOWN-AWAY...
A FRAIL SNOW was falling outside, as I lackadaisically made my way down an aisle inside of a Walgreen's drug store in the city of Denver to pick up some diapers for my seven-month old daughter. I didn't have a care in the world. At age 27, I had lived through World War Two, gotten married, fathered one child, was a fanatic about the game of baseball, loved downing waterfalls of beer, adored my wife and daughter, and was congratulating myself on the fact that I had finally overcome a lingering cold.
Having paid for my merchandise, I paused to take a peek at a display television set while wrapping a scarf around my neck, readied myself to depart the store; and then the program was interrupted and the CBS announcer, Walter Cronkite, came on, his face grave, to say that the President of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything stopped. In his blunt, crusty voice, the famed news anchor said that the details were sketchy. The regular program resumed; the kids in the store went back to playing, while the adults slowly began to gather around the TV, then stood watching in stone-cold silence; and a few moments after that, Cronkite returned, removed his glasses, this time there was a tear in his eye and his voice seemed bewildered. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was dead.
I recall whirling in pain and fury, slamming the bag full of diapers with my hand, and reeling out into the falling snow. A man of grace, wit, irony, youth, and courage was forever gone. All over the city, hundreds of other human beings were doing the same thing. Doors slammed and the sobs of disbelief and sorrow began. Mayhem was everywhere. Oh,my God, they shot the President! And They Killed President Kennedy! And He's been shot dead! Near the corner of my house, I saw a neighbor crying beneath a tree. Another neighbor sat on a curb, sobbing into her hands in the falling snow. Men burst into tears, children were running with the news and bawling women everywhere. It was a scale of grief I'd never seen before in any place on the face of the Earth.
Fifty springtime's that have come and gone since that Godawful day, and for those of us who were young then, that day still lives on in vivid detail. We remember who we were in love with. What we were wearing. We recall images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out of a crowd inside of a police station to blow him away; Jacqueline Kennedy's extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline's befuddled eyes and John-John saluting. We remember the drum rolls and the riderless horse.
And now, several generations have come to full bloom with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; only that the Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school; while I still remember him smiling in that analytical way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and contempt, the wind tossing his hair. Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed and the mistakes and flaws of the Kennedy presidency are now obvious. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now, and time itself has altered his once-glittering presence.
Nonetheless...
Understanding that Camelot did not exist and that Jack Kennedy was not a perfect man, I still remain moved almost to tears when a glimpse of him appears on the television or I hear his voice coming from a radio? I've talked to my daughter about him after she's seen me turning away from some televised image of Jack or take a sudden breath of air, or flick away away a half-formed tear. I can almost hear him speaking from the past about how the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in his century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace - and I'm gone.
After all had changed from the world I knew in 1963, after the murder in Dallas and after the war in Vietnam; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit had exploded into violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate and the resignation of Nixon; after the Beatles had arrived and departed and broken up; after John Lennon had been killed; after Ford, and Carter and Reagan had given way to the Bush dynasty with Clinton sandwiched in between, I was driving alone alone in a rental car late one afternoon through the state of Texas, on my way to Galveston.
It had been 40 years after Jack Kennedy had died, and I was moving through vast, empty stretches of unfamiliar land when my engine blew. I pulled over - and quickly discovered that the car would no longer move. I was alone in the emptiness of Texas. Trucks roared by, some cars, but nobody stopped. In the distance, I spotted a small farm house. A dusty Ford pickup truck was parked to the side. It was getting dark, and for a moment, I considered turning back. Feeling uneasy, I walked toward it along a potholed dirt road.
And then the door opened. A beefy man in a Stetson hat and old cowboy boots stood there glaring at me as I came closer. He squinted and then asked me what I wanted. I told him I had car trouble and needed to phone a car repair shop. He again stared at me for a moment and then asked me if I first wanted something to drink. I glanced past him into the house. On the wall there two pictures. One of the man standing before me when he was a young. The other photo was of Jack Kennedy. Water? he asked. Yes, I said, some water would be fine.
He had taken note of me looking at both photos on the wall. That Jack Kennedy was one hell of a guy, the man said. I agreed. He told me to grab a seat before he added, I fought in the Bay of Pigs, the picture of me was taken just before we were sent to Cuba. He paused. Would you like a beer instead of water? I nodded. After he had offered to make a call to the repair shop to have my car towed; we spent the remainder of the late afternoon and on into early evening talking together and drinking our beer and laughing at our remembrances of the man - of our Jack.
He then decided to grill a couple of steaks and asked if I would like to spend the night instead of having to rent a motel room in town. I said I would like that very much, and we talked and laughed some more; as day finally faded on into night, the two of us seemed to have had grabbed a bit of our lost innocence back for one brief shining moment in our shared memories of the slain President, which seemed to be just fine with the both of us...
A FRAIL SNOW was falling outside, as I lackadaisically made my way down an aisle inside of a Walgreen's drug store in the city of Denver to pick up some diapers for my seven-month old daughter. I didn't have a care in the world. At age 27, I had lived through World War Two, gotten married, fathered one child, was a fanatic about the game of baseball, loved downing waterfalls of beer, adored my wife and daughter, and was congratulating myself on the fact that I had finally overcome a lingering cold.
Having paid for my merchandise, I paused to take a peek at a display television set while wrapping a scarf around my neck, readied myself to depart the store; and then the program was interrupted and the CBS announcer, Walter Cronkite, came on, his face grave, to say that the President of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Everything stopped. In his blunt, crusty voice, the famed news anchor said that the details were sketchy. The regular program resumed; the kids in the store went back to playing, while the adults slowly began to gather around the TV, then stood watching in stone-cold silence; and a few moments after that, Cronkite returned, removed his glasses, this time there was a tear in his eye and his voice seemed bewildered. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, was dead.
I recall whirling in pain and fury, slamming the bag full of diapers with my hand, and reeling out into the falling snow. A man of grace, wit, irony, youth, and courage was forever gone. All over the city, hundreds of other human beings were doing the same thing. Doors slammed and the sobs of disbelief and sorrow began. Mayhem was everywhere. Oh,my God, they shot the President! And They Killed President Kennedy! And He's been shot dead! Near the corner of my house, I saw a neighbor crying beneath a tree. Another neighbor sat on a curb, sobbing into her hands in the falling snow. Men burst into tears, children were running with the news and bawling women everywhere. It was a scale of grief I'd never seen before in any place on the face of the Earth.
Fifty springtime's that have come and gone since that Godawful day, and for those of us who were young then, that day still lives on in vivid detail. We remember who we were in love with. What we were wearing. We recall images on television screens, black-and-white and grainy: Lee Harvey Oswald dying over and over again as Jack Ruby steps out of a crowd inside of a police station to blow him away; Jacqueline Kennedy's extraordinary wounded grace; Caroline's befuddled eyes and John-John saluting. We remember the drum rolls and the riderless horse.
And now, several generations have come to full bloom with no memory at all of the Kennedy years; only that the Kennedy is the name of an airport or a boulevard or a high school; while I still remember him smiling in that analytical way, at once genuine and detached, capable of fondness and contempt, the wind tossing his hair. Certainly, the psychic wound of his sudden death appears to have healed and the mistakes and flaws of the Kennedy presidency are now obvious. Those who hated him on November 21, 1963, continue to hate him now, and time itself has altered his once-glittering presence.
Nonetheless...
Understanding that Camelot did not exist and that Jack Kennedy was not a perfect man, I still remain moved almost to tears when a glimpse of him appears on the television or I hear his voice coming from a radio? I've talked to my daughter about him after she's seen me turning away from some televised image of Jack or take a sudden breath of air, or flick away away a half-formed tear. I can almost hear him speaking from the past about how the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in his century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace - and I'm gone.
After all had changed from the world I knew in 1963, after the murder in Dallas and after the war in Vietnam; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit had exploded into violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate and the resignation of Nixon; after the Beatles had arrived and departed and broken up; after John Lennon had been killed; after Ford, and Carter and Reagan had given way to the Bush dynasty with Clinton sandwiched in between, I was driving alone alone in a rental car late one afternoon through the state of Texas, on my way to Galveston.
It had been 40 years after Jack Kennedy had died, and I was moving through vast, empty stretches of unfamiliar land when my engine blew. I pulled over - and quickly discovered that the car would no longer move. I was alone in the emptiness of Texas. Trucks roared by, some cars, but nobody stopped. In the distance, I spotted a small farm house. A dusty Ford pickup truck was parked to the side. It was getting dark, and for a moment, I considered turning back. Feeling uneasy, I walked toward it along a potholed dirt road.
And then the door opened. A beefy man in a Stetson hat and old cowboy boots stood there glaring at me as I came closer. He squinted and then asked me what I wanted. I told him I had car trouble and needed to phone a car repair shop. He again stared at me for a moment and then asked me if I first wanted something to drink. I glanced past him into the house. On the wall there two pictures. One of the man standing before me when he was a young. The other photo was of Jack Kennedy. Water? he asked. Yes, I said, some water would be fine.
He had taken note of me looking at both photos on the wall. That Jack Kennedy was one hell of a guy, the man said. I agreed. He told me to grab a seat before he added, I fought in the Bay of Pigs, the picture of me was taken just before we were sent to Cuba. He paused. Would you like a beer instead of water? I nodded. After he had offered to make a call to the repair shop to have my car towed; we spent the remainder of the late afternoon and on into early evening talking together and drinking our beer and laughing at our remembrances of the man - of our Jack.
He then decided to grill a couple of steaks and asked if I would like to spend the night instead of having to rent a motel room in town. I said I would like that very much, and we talked and laughed some more; as day finally faded on into night, the two of us seemed to have had grabbed a bit of our lost innocence back for one brief shining moment in our shared memories of the slain President, which seemed to be just fine with the both of us...
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