I remember it all too well. Everyone alive at that time does. November 22, 1963. I was in 5th grade and we were in the middle of our math lesson. Twenty minutes away from lunch break. We all could smell what what was being prepared down in the cafeteria. And then all hell broke loose....
The principal came running into the room, hysterical. Screaming. The President had been shot. She was maniacal. She and my teacher went hysterical. We all sat there, confused. They both broke into tears while we sat there, confused even more. What the hell had just happened??? Over the next 20 minutes even more hell broke loose. Our nation had just been shattered. Much like our Presidents head.
I was way too young to understand the true damage of this but I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. WAY terribly wrong. For shit's sake, I was in 5th grade and I watched my world go to hell in a hand basket. By the time that I got home we had a new president. And my world, our world and your world had changed. Irreparably. Even as a child I was stunned. But I wasn't really sure why.
It was "simpler" time back then. Today this would have caused a total lock down. EVERYWHERE. Back then it was different. We just got sent home. With no lunch. I was still confused as I walked in the front door. The television was on and my mother was on her knees, hunched over the coffee table in front of our big Curtis-Mathis. In tears. Listening to Walter Cronkite who was also in tears. What had just happened? Something was so horridly wrong and I was too young to understand the depths of it. It would only get worse...
School was canceled. Regular broadcast television was canceled. It was nothing but news broadcasts. And they were all ugly and desperately looking for absolution. And then a couple of days later all hell broke loose again. I was setting at the snack bar in our kitchen, my mother and I sharing a couple of fried egg sandwiches and watching the news over a 16-inch portable television when we both witnessed the live assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. The sandwich fell out of my hand and onto the floor. Our English Bulldog dived on it in a second. In grainy black and white, on a small screen, with some aluminum foil on one of the rabbit ears I had just witnessed a murder. Live. I was 10 years old. And once again, without lunch. A murder on live television. Over lunch. It took me almost 30 years to regain the courage to even consider a fried egg sandwich on toast again. To this day, I can only finish about half of it.
Thru the decades that followed I acquired some understanding. Some insight into those happenings. And doubts and questions as well. I have witnessed the death of his two youngest brothers, his wife and his youngest son, all tragically. By bullets, disease and accidents that make no sense whatsoever. And once again, I sit here with half of a sandwich in front of me, made way to salty by way too many tears...
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