November 22nd

Although my gut feeling is that the nations in their long histories have accumulated too many memorial days, that is because there have been too many unnatural deaths, and that is because humans are a flawed species and hurt each other.

I have been thinking about this because at some point last Wednesday, I realized that it was November 22nd, which for anyone above a certain age is shorthand for an earthshaking human event. For my generation, it was a formative event.

On that day 43 years ago, the 4th grade girls at my school had spent recess in a secluded corner of the playground rehearsing the role of the Chinese Dolls in the Nutcracker Suite. This had been assigned to us by the school's new music teacher, who had galvanized the children with her ambitions for the winter holiday pageant.

The Chinese Dolls had just received our costumes – embroidered turquoise jackets and black trousers packaged in crackly plastic wrapping that was not to be opened yet, and I was immensely excited by the idea of wearing this costume, and this is what I was thinking about on the morning of November 22, 1963.

We reentered the schoolroom after recess to find our classroom teacher slumped at her desk with her head cradled in the crook of her arm. I remember the part in her hair at the top of her head, but not her hair color or her face or even her name. She lifted her head at our entrance, and her eyes were wet. I had never seen an adult cry before and, in fact, I thought adults couldn't. That when you grew breasts, your tear ducts dried up or something.

This is what I remember of the year 1963: the delicious smell of playground asphalt baking in the sun, the dazzling Chinese pajama costume folded in its plastic wrapping, and JFK's assassination.

When the teacher told us that the President of the United States and Governor of Texas had been shot while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas, I imagined Caroline's father (for at the time, that is how I thought of my country's President) and another man sitting side by side, legs dangling, on the open tailgate of a Ford station wagon (the kind of car my father drove). They were dressed identically in Stetson hats, checked shirts, blue jeans and cowboy boots. The vehicle was jolting, its wheels raising puffs of dust from the desert floor, when suddenly out of nowhere, an Indian galloped up on a pony, whipped out a pistol rather than the expected bow and arrow, shot both men and galloped away.

I didn't know that Texas even had cities or highways, and was incapable of comprehending the teacher's words another way until I had reached home. There, the television set, bought by my parents in order to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis, corrected my understanding.

During my school years, after JFK there was Bobby and then Martin Luther King. At the time of their murders, I mourned these men as the dead fathers of children. When I married, I came to understand them as the dead husbands of wives left alone to fend for themselves and their children. Only much, much later, as I have lived in the world, have I come to understand that everything that is potentially best in people, and everything tender and hopeful that can be made of human society, is jeopardized when little men with cramped imaginations murder visionary leaders.