Family Snapshot

I arrived on the planet the same year Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. I mention this not merely to illustrate how old I am (I have other, far sadder, proofs, believe me) but to help place the distance we've traveled in a larger context. In our neighborhood everyone went to church on Sunday-I assumed they went to different Masses. Only after Neil from next door and I started riding the bus to New Brunswick to attend 'parochial school' did I learn about other religions. I had always stayed close to the tribe and was surprised to learn how wide and big was the new world.

We're a different country now-not better, not worse, just different. In 2010, we elected a man of African-American heritage to the Presidency and while I'm sure in some circles there was murmuring, that was about all there was. Fifty years ago, a Roman Catholic sought the Presidency. I can tell you as a kid in the weeds (literally), it was an issue very much talked about aloud and loudly. I was only eight and I could hear every meaning, and its subtext, very clearly.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to a generation of children in developments flung across the country, hugging rail and bus lines so fathers could go to 'the city' for work, was like a being from another planet. If the term had existed, we'd have called him a "rock star." He didn't seem much older than our parents and he was a lot younger than any of the people we saw on TV from Washington. Ike, the man he succeeded in a very close election, was about the age of my grandfather and while I didn't know the phrase 'the changing of the guard', I knew something had happened.

Looking back, I can't really remember color, though, of course, our lives were lived in color. Televisions were the fireplaces of the suburbs and we gathered around them every night. There were no remotes but there was little need for them as, if you were lucky, you had ABC, CBS and NBC (We also had WNET, the educational channel) and most towns had a local daily newspaper, with a morning and an afternoon edition. And then it all stopped.

Today forty-eight years ago, John Kennedy was murdered. I was in a basement classroom in school and he still died despite all of the prayers Sister Immaculata, our principal, led us through as across the country everything moved very slowly and then much too quickly. You felt as if you were in a fever dream and when you finally awakened, it was hard to remember the life you had once had. While we in the basement that day were too young to grasp the scale and scope of the shift in the world, we knew from the first announcement of trouble in Dallas, Texas, that today is different, today is not the same.
-bill kenny