I Was Seven When JFK was Shot
How can I know what's normal?
I’m thinking of a number. You probably are, too. Let me guess. Seven?
Headlines are great.
The number seven is central to my life. I love multiples of seven, especially 42. (The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything). Numbers beginning or ending in seven bring joy, especially when embedded in birthdays. (27, my daughter). Strings of digits that resolve through addition into seven are delightful. Examples: 1989, 2005. Seven is magic.
Except it isn’t. It’s magical thinking.
There’s nothing intrinsically special about any number. Our brains seek patterns in the world and assign meanings to them. You might see four as special, because of the four cardinal directions. Or you grew up as one of four siblings who never argued over who got to sit in the way-back of the station wagon. You took turns. Good for you.
Seven is important to me because it’s the age I was when the world changed forever. But not, perhaps, for the reasons you might expect.
For my seventh birthday I received a book about cats. I learned all the breeds, and that my cat — I won’t tell you his name for cybersecurity reasons — was a Persian, because of his long hair. Never mind his orange tabby markings like a domestic shorthair. The two breeds were mutually exclusive. Dogs could be mutts and mongrels. Cats couldn’t.
On a trip to the Black Hills, I spent my saved allowance on a bracelet with a linked row of polished semiprecious stones. I’d unclasp it and recite their names. Onyx. Rose quartz. Tiger’s eye. Carnelian. Amethyst. My next-door neighbor — fourteen, seven times two! — gave me a diary with a lock. I filled it with special words, starting with those of the bracelet stones. I hid the diary in the top drawer of my dresser.
I read Through the Looking Glass, where the fog lifted, revealing my new home. I’d found my vocation.
I was a writer.
Last Saturday, an attempt to kill a presidential candidate brought back memories of other shootings. If you are part of my generation, the same thoughts may have occurred to you.
When JFK was shot, I took my cues from the adults around me. My aunt was annoyed that without regular TV programming, she couldn’t watch her soap operas. I played Twister with my cousin as the funeral droned in the background. The somber pageantry darkened an already black-and-white screen.
I watched as Lee Harvey Oswald get shot. I thought: If he killed the President, why is shooting him so terrible? And everyone called him by three names. Why didn’t they go by initials, like JFK and LBJ? Why did LBJ have such big ears?
Regular programming came back. Cartoons returned. So did The Beverly Hillbillies.
As an adult, I look back at JFK’s assassination as an event that was both historical, belonging to grownups, and personal, belonging to me. It — and the actual and attempted killings that followed — interested me only intermittently. No one told me at the time that shooting a president was a rare occurrence. What was normal? I had no way to judge.
When Trump was grazed by a bullet, I didn’t know how to respond. I felt deep sadness for the family of the firefighter who’d died protecting them. I was relieved that the candidate survived. I felt little else. Why?
If Kennedy had been assassinated a year or two later, would I have known how to process it? How had his death, when I was seven years old and fighting to become myself, shaped my understanding of the world?
I sat down at my computer and started typing.
JFK
I was in second grade. Recess over, I stood in line at the drinking fountain. The girl behind me said Someone shot the President. I didn’t believe her, until I did. Because the janitors heard it on the radio. Because the principal told us over the loudspeaker. Because all the teachers were crying.
I loved words. Whenever I learned a special word — one that made me quiver with joy — I wrote it down in the diary I kept locked and hidden in the top drawer of my dresser. Antique. Abracadabra.
After I got off the school bus, I went straight to my room. When I wrote down the word I’d just learned, I didn’t feel that shimmer. This felt different. Charged with menace, it was sibilant and strange.
Assassination.
MLK
Sixth grade was heartbreak enough. But as my small world was spinning out of my control, another murder. “Senseless” always preceded the word, as if anything, murder included, made sense.
It was April, a month before the state spelling bee. Because I was the school district champion, I studied assiduously, copying words in a fat spiral notebook kept in plain sight. The words I kept hidden were the poems and stories I wrote.
Most of the words I learned came from the dictionary. Some came from the news. I could not stop watching the news. And I couldn’t understand what was going on and why anyone would shoot a man who spoke so eloquently of freedom and peace.
Assassination.
RFK
My last week of elementary school.
A boy from the AV club wheeled a television into the classroom and turned it to the news but kept the sound low. Podiums bristled with microphones, footage of a crowd filled with joy, then shock. Then the sorrow and blood.
Someone switched the channel to a game show and cranked up the sound. I exchanged autographs with a few classmates who ended up going to different schools. I saved those loops and scrawls anyway, in case one of them got famous.
Our teacher inscribed everyone's book the same way: 2 Ys U R 2 Ys U B I C U R 2 Ys 4 ME. For mine, however, she substituted a cute little drawing of a bee for the corresponding letter. Too wise you are, too wise you be. I see you are too wise for me. Bee = be. A rebus.
I hadn’t won the state. “You did okay. Really,” she said, then turned to the next student.
I took a summer school class in creative writing. The teacher gave me a cardboard star for being the star of the class. She wrote on the back of it: You have a gift. Keep writing. Don’t let anyone stop you.
I don’t know what happened to the star.
Assassination.
Reagan
I was newly married. My husband and I had just bought a house. Our mortgage had a 14 percent interest rate.
My husband worked as a librarian at the university where I was a student. The question arose: Did we need me to quit school and work full-time? Things were tense between us.
I was taking my final linguistics course, syntax, for the second time. During my first try, my psychiatrist gave me a note saying, in effect, that Finnish verb conjugations were giving me panic attacks and overwhelming my fragile ego so please give Mary a W instead of an N. This time, I had no such note.
I gripped the seat of my desk to keep from sliding between the tectonic plates of structural and generative grammar. During the long trek home, I was careful to stay away from the railings of the bridge John Berryman had jumped from a decade earlier.
On March 30, 1081, I arrived home and pulled off my coat. My shirt was soaked with sweat. I turned on the TV. Again? I sat down on the sofa and closed my eyes, too exhausted to form a complete thought, and fell asleep.
I roused myself.
Al Haig, Secretary of State, declared that he was in charge. He became a joke. Then a meme, when the Internet arrived.
The Gipper was chipper despite a punctured lung and a broken rib.
I couldn’t afford to pay attention. I was struggling with subject-auxiliary inversion and the decision between graduate studies and working full-time.
I got an A. I did not go on to get a PhD.
James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary, was hit by a bullet that exploded in his brain. After years of lobbying, a gun control bill was passed in his name. In 2014, his death was ruled a homicide.
Assassination.
Trump
I’m a widow, a designation I still can’t fully grasp.
Last Saturday, I met some friends at the Nook, a long skinny bar/greasy spoon with a bowling alley downstairs. After burgers and malts, we strolled through the neighborhood of pretty houses with well-tended yards. An idyllic evening.
My Apple watch vibrated: a notification. Shooting at Trump rally, one dead. Doesn’t say who it was, so probably not Trump, I said to my friends.
We returned to our cars. Driving home along a sylvan parkway, facing into the sun that was about to reach the golden hour, that time of day when the light is ideal for painters and photographers, I turned on NPR.
Assassination?
Around two a.m. a storm began. Trees bent wildly in the wind. Rain pelted the house, then lashed furiously against it. The lightning was like nothing I’ve ever seen.
It flashed rapidly, as if sending an urgent message. The clouds were illuminated with an eerie blue-white light. A forked branch landed on an electrical wire, swaying ominously.
My very old cat sat motionless on her cushioned stool. I stroked her fur. She shared her animal wisdom in the form of a steady silence.
Apocalypse.
This story is not about politics. Like you, I’m just trying to cut through chaos.
I worry that the events of our early years shaped my generation in a way that normalized them. We had no way of grasping what was happening. Did we shrug, and pass this indifference to our children and grandchildren?
Pictures are riveting. I grew up with television, movies, and magazines with lots of photos. Now I get most of my news from the Internet. I skip, scroll, glance at a headline, move on. I never had TikTok or Twitter/X. I unfriended Facebook. Instagram shouts in a language more foreign to me than Finnish. I silence it.
Our discourse has devolved into blaming, false righteousness, and malice. I’m as guilty as anyone of mean posts and savage emails. What happened to the seven-year-old who saw words as so precious that they had to be kept in a sacred place?
She grew up. Earned her MFA in poetry. More than once, her writing was interrupted. She learned that interruptions don’t last forever.
And she remembered that at the bottom of Pandora’s box is Hope.
All subscribers receive my newsletters in your inbox about once a week, can read and comment on all posts and join a vibrant community. If you value my work and have the means to do so, please consider a paid* subscription. Your financial support gives me, for the first time in my life, the joy and dignity that comes with being paid to do the work I love and share it with the world. You’ll get some extras, like chat threads that let you engage more deeply with me and the Writer, interrupted community. All subscribers have my undying gratitude.
*We face challenges in our lives. I’ve been there. Let me know and I’ll comp you, no questions asked.
I was seven, too. My parents were going through an ugly divorce, and on that day, November 22, my dad’s relatives were banging on the door and demanding to have a visit with me. I was hiding in the basement, watching TV. I hate to say it, but my first thought was that maybe if JFK was no longer President I wouldn’t have to fail at the President’s Council on Physical Fitness test again. I was a good speller, reader and writer at seven, but I couldn’t get a passing grade in any of the categories of physical achievement I was supposed to. I credit JFK with my lifetime attitude toward exercise! The memory of his funeral has always stuck with me, however, including Jackie’s veil, John John’s salute, the funeral procession and the priest spreading plumes of incense during the funeral service. After that, I came to the conclusion that no president would ever be safe.
That last sentence, tho. At the bottom of Pandora's box is HOPE. That brings tears to my old eyes! I was in 7th grade when JFK was assassinated; home alone as evening fell, fearing the world would end. Then came the crushing parade of assassinations. We Boomers may rightfully be blamed for much. But in the 60s, we BELIEVED. We believed in our power and intent to change the world! Oh, we were well past hope: we KNEW. And now it feels as though every last glimmer of that dream - That confidence! That vision! That chutzpah! - has been buried. Still, I appreciate the reminder of what sits alongside all the misery in Pandora's Box, and still hope for better days.