Reflections on November 22

      November 22, 1963, dawned pretty much like any other day. I was in eighth grade, and while I don't have a specific memory about the early morning, I most likely drug my feet as we were getting ready for school. Mom was a teacher so we did not have to worry about catching the bus...but we did know if the bus went by the house and we weren't ready, it was going to be tight. I probably discussed with my mother about how appropriate it might be for me to take my transistor radio to school, and I won that one...the radio went into my pocket where it always was.

      About 11:30 or so, my class was in line to get into the cafeteria for lunch, knowing that when we finished lunch we were to go to the gym where we would spend the playground part of lunch hour, for someone from either the seventh or eighth grade had poured glue and thumb tacks all over the seats of the art room, and since no one would talk, both classes were to spend the recess and lunch break time in the gym, in the bleachers, doing nothing. Then mom did something she had never done before...she sought me out and wanted to know if I had my radio. She looked worried, funny, and she had never before gone looking for me during school. Everyone knew who she was and who I was, but she tried to honor my space, and I loved her for that...but on this day she came to me.

     The radio was in my locker, so I gave her the combination, wondered briefly why there was not a radio in the teacher's lounge, and then went about my lunch and the subsequent punishment. We were astounded when we arrived in the gym to find the whole school there...there had to be something going on, because the elementary kids had not been involved in the great glue caper. When we were all in our places, the principal told us the news: President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The little kids did not really know what that meant, but we older ones did. I remember thinking, as school was being dismissed, that there had been a shift in the universe...that somehow things would never be the same...that something more than just the president had died on that day in Dallas. The seventh and eighth grades went ahead and attended the dress rehearsal of the high school play that afternoon, and then we were also sent home. We had just gotten a television, and for three days, we were mesmerized by the events across the country.

     Every generation has a moment in its history, where memories stick like glue...December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963; January 28, 1986; September 11, 2001...those days which changed our world and leave memories time can never erase.