Do you remember this day?

Every generation has it's defining moment of innocence lost.  For our parents it was Pearl Harbor.  For our children, it was 9-11 But for the generation of Baby Boomers, it is November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

I remember exactly where I was; in the back seat of my parents green Belair.  It was a long car and it had fins.  My mother has just picked me up from morning session kindergarten when the news came on the radio,  She pulled the car over at the corner of Bartee and Van Nuys and wept.  I didn't really understand it, I suppose, but I knew something terrible had happened.   People walked around in a daze.  We watched the services on television, still not understanding the "why" of the equation.

We still mourn JFK and the promise he brought to us; a promise unfulfilled.  I think about those he left behind, how every year, his life and tragic death is played out in the media.  It must be difficult and I wonder if time and repetition makes it any easier to bear.  The Kennedy family has had their share of very public tragedy, I wonder if they learn from an early age how to bear grief stoically and publicly.  I remember reading that the nation looked to Jackie to show us how to mourn.  What a terrible burden that must have been on a young woman with small children.  It must have been agony not to be able to shut herself away from the public and bear her personal tragedy before the world with such grace.  I could not have done it and I wonder how she did it.  From all accounts she was a very private person, thrust into the national spotlight by her marriage to a very high profile man.  In our grief, we turned to her, forgetting she was a woman needing comfort, not the one we should look to to comfort us.  We forgot she was a woman and tried to make her into something else.  I think that's why she married Onassis, not for love but shelter from the storm.  I don't really know, just conjecture I suppose.

Still the iconic images of those days, fifty years ago are burned in our collective conscious.   The motorcade, JFK grabbing his throat,  the secret service agent crawling on the trunk of the car, Jackie's hand stretched out to him, young John saluting his father's casket.  The young widow in a black mantilla holding the hands of her young children.

Where were  you, fifty years ago today?