As are so many Americans right now, I'm remembering fifty years ago this day...the assassination of President Kennedy. The unspeakable horror, the unimaginable...blank. I just draw a blank...my feelings back then refuse to be categorized.
I do remember I followed others out of the office into the streets of Los Angeles. People were just milling around, and here came the Los Angeles Times with its Extra, along with the Herald Examiner (I think was its name...now gone, of course).
I remember at first we only knew he had been shot, and there was a low-murmuring which I finally recognized as prayers, and several of us headed for a church...any church...to pray. My prayer was that he live, and then that he not be incapacitated. I don't really remember, but I don't think I prayed for America, maybe not until I witnessed on live television Lee Harvey Oswald being shot before the entire watching world.
I do distinctly remember, as if it were now, standing on a street corner crying. An older black woman was standing next to me, and she, too, was crying. We were talking to each other...just words, not whole intelligent sentences..."Why?" and "Horrible" and "Please" just fell from our lips.
Then she said to me (and this is the indelible now-feeling memory): "You're crying for yourself; you should be crying for me. You're young...you may see his like again. I'm old...I never will." And we hugged and sobbed.
I thought of her the night of President Obama's first presidential win...I thought of her and cried again, this time in joy.
Thank you.
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