I wasn't going to write much of an entry tonight, probably just a quick "I've been busy doing stuff", but then I read l-empress's, and I remembered.
Not that I could have forgotten, of course; it's on every TV news channel and everywhere else. Forty years.
I read somewhere today that it's supposed that everyone who was at least three years old forty years ago remembers where he or she was that day. I don't know if that's true. Not everyone remembers back that far. Of course, I have what is referred to in my family as pre-natal memory, so I would. But I wasn't three, I was just short of ten. I remember too watching JFK's inauguration on TV, just a week after my 8th birthday. We weren't home that day because of the inauguration, but because there had been a blizzard overnight and schools were closed. My father couldn't even get to work.
But the other day, forty years ago today. I have told this story so many times, as people are wont to do: where were you when ... the Challenger exploded, the towers fell, JFK ... And I have told students more times than I can count, so that they could see that even teachers once were children, and even in the same schools they are going to, and that one day they will be grown-ups too and will be telling children were they were when the towers fell, when the shuttle blew up ...
I was in fifth grade. It was a dreary, gray afternoon, and we must have been restless, because Mrs. Seibel took us out to play dodgeball on the blacktop after lunch. It was not an outside day, and we were the only class out. We played for a while as an old man walked slowly across the playground, taking the shortcut from the side-street to Broadway. When he came near us, he stopped for a minute and talked to the teacher, and then moved on.
She called us over to her, called us in with her arms like a great big mother duck. As we gathered, she said "The president has been shot. The president has been shot." One little girl began to cry uncontrollably, and never stopped even when we went home later in the day.
We returned silently to our classroom, waiting and wondering. I only found out many years later -- maybe five years ago -- that they had made an announcement over the P.A. about the shooting, but of course, my class was outside and didn't hear it. Even so, we didn't know yet exactly what had happened.
And then, one of the boys got an idea: we could look out our classroom window, across Broadway, at the Post Office. We couldn't see the school flag from our window, but we could see the Post Office. We all ran, and lined up along the full length of the windows that covered one wall of the room.
We looked, but it was only moments before we saw: the flag was being lowered to half-staff. So we knew. Our president was dead. Too big a thing for the ten year old mind to grasp. Too big a thing, as it turned out, for most American minds to grasp.
We went home, all quietly. We watched television for three days, everyone in America.
Forty years. Feels like I was just there.
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I'm watching Queer Eye on tape
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