remembering

(source)

November 22, 1963.

Fifty years ago today, I was nine years old and the day began like any other day in my nine year old life. A school morning, seemingly unremarkable and then my favorite subject "lunch time", followed by playing on the playground after lunch, before returning to class for the afternoon. 

If you lived close enough to the school, you were allowed to walk home for lunch. And so it was that one of my classmates went home for lunch on that ordinary morning and returned with the news that our President had been shot and killed. 

I can remember that we were very upset and called our little friend a liar.

Funny how selective the memory is. I have no memory of our teacher or Principal talking to us when we returned to the classroom after lunch. And I can't remember if we just proceeded with the rest of the school day, as usual? Or if we were sent home?

I don't remember anything my mother said to me when I got home from school. I know that sometime after I was home from school that day, my father came home and said to me, "You will never forget this day. You will remember it for always".

I remember seeing so many of the images on television those first few days. Walter Cronkite. Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. The line to see the casket in the rotunda. Little John John saluting. The entire country in shock, grief and mourning.

And as my father had foreseen, I have remembered it, always. A day that changed our lives forever as individuals and as a country.

Remembering my father today also, tomorrow would have been his 95th birthday.