50 and counting; how could we?

Fifty years ago today, I played hooky from school.

I had a difficult fifth-grade year, as I remember, and I talked my mother into letting me stay away from school that day. She said yes partly because she and I had mostly lived through the science project from hell and had come out the other side bloodied but not bowed. I couldn't stay at home by myself, which would have been perfect, but instead I stayed home with a friend of my mother, who had a son my age and didn't work. He was a good friend, but in an irony he never let me forget, he had to go to school while I stayed at his house.

My premise of staying home was I had a fever. My mother, never one to turn to tricky upscale things like, oh, a thermometer, said I felt warm to her when she put her hand on my forehead in response to me saying I felt weak,I felt funny, I felt icky.

I gave her those big ol' eyes routine, you know the ones...you shoot your eyes to the corners of the lid, roll them around like a rubber ball, then let them rest there like you were looking for something on the ceiling. Makes for remorseful goings on, like, "you're leaving me and I feel warm, weak, funny, ICKY?" Like I said, ideally it worked so much I got time alone. Mrs. Suire had to do.

At one point, Mrs. Suire told me she had to go for groceries, and she asked me to stay at home. "Oh, I think I could do that."

She got back, as I recall (though I could certainly look it up) and I helped her with the groceries as she told me something had happened. All the radio stations were broadcasting about the same thing, and she believed it had something to do with the governor of Texas being shot.

We cut on the TV, which got one channel, and was black and white,  and we were given more and more details. Ol' Walter (Cronkite), the keeper of all information as far as we were concerned, said President Kennedy, had been shot, then moments later it seemed, President Kennedy had died.

I couldn't imagine him dead. Fifty years later, I still can't. Not really. It's like a day. A very bad day. The kind of day you're sure will go away if you but put you head under the covers. I feel like I could do that sometime, you know?

See, Kennedy was the first instance where I broke away from the mold, pushed away from what I was told to what I believed. I loved to hear him speak, though I thought his accent funny. I practiced it constantly in front of the mirror (along with the other keeper of the flame, Elvis).

He was a Democrat, but he was hated by my Democrat parents, who were anything but democratic. He believe in equality, no matter how hard earned, and so did I, even as a fifth-grader.

I didn't know Democrat from Republican, elephant from donkey, but I believed this man when he spoke, and I wanted others to believe him.

Oh, it was a difficult time, at best.. I lived through Philadelphia and the civil rights workers being buried in an earthen damn near there. I lived through bombings near there. I lived through bombings of mosques in Meridian, near Philadelphia. And on and on.

But somehow I believed this man would end all that. He didn't, at least in part because his life was cut short by an assassin's bullet.

Fifty years ago today. How could we?