Leaving Kalamazoo

When Kennedy was shot I was in Mr. Frechetta’s social studies class and the announcement came over the intercom, and kids were running into the hall, with their hands over their mouths and crying and holding onto each other and no one knew what to do. Pretty soon it was clear school couldn’t continue, kids were weeping and looking dazed and it was a major group trauma; the group was the whole world it turned out and everyone went home to watch it on TV.

I saw Oswald get shot on TV, Jack Ruby walked right to him and blam pulled the trigger and Oswald got a look like he just ate something that tasted really really bad and collapsed.

And then there wasn’t any school because of the funeral and John John saluting in his short pants and Jackie in her veil. And before that Johnson taking the oath in the plane.

Suddenly it was summer and not only had we moved across town we were moving across the country to Methuen Mass, where my grandmother lived. It was 1964 and the Beatles. And the Rolling Stones and I fell down on the floor at my grandmothers house when Mick Jagger came on the Ed Sullivan Show and swooned. I never screamed like the younger Beatle fans, but I swooned in front of the TV. My aunt lived with my grandmother and she didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

The new school was another brick building but not so old as the one I almost had to go to in Kalamazoo (Did I tell you I grew up in Kalamazoo Michigan, halfway between Detroit and Chicago; how Midwestern can you get?). But there wasn’t a pool, and not much of a paper and no theatre and certainly no glass walls and pods.