My Favorite Emily D (as promised to Ps): An Ode To J.F.K.

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.



My very good friend and, at the time, confrere, Brother Claude Lane, O.S.B. gave me this poem as it was published on a commemorative card marking the 10th anniversary of the death of J.F.K. I was taken with the starkness and simplicity of the poem. In that card I remembered a special moment that I had experienced with my family. A moment that we, as a family, shared and which has always been a part of our great story together, a slice of our intimacy.

On the card was a photograph of the slain President. And husband. And father. And brother. And son. And veteran. And friend. His face represented so many things. Yeah, all the dirt came out eventually. The infidelities. The grave imperfections of one man that mark those of so many other men. But when you're the President, it's not supposed to happen. It matters more somehow. We choose to make it matter more somehow.

In that face, though, were confidences that I remember oh so very well. And I am delighted to say that I personally saw that face as it rode along in the motorcade down South State Street in Salt Lake City in 1963. It was cold because it was getting to be the middle of November. Twenty-two days into that month, of course, the motorcade was doing the same thing at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Waiting there in Texas were thousands of other faces, standing along the same sort of squeegeed street just as we had waited several days prior in Salt Lake City. All of them making their own small talk, meeting people, waiting for the very same moment I had. All of them expecting to come away with one of the greatest experiences an American can hope for: seeing the President of the United States. Alive.

I was nine.

We waited for nearly two hours along our Utah street to see the face with those confidences come riding by. With the passing of time, the excitement of the waiting crowd building, people were well into meeting each other. My father recognized a man from his Pharmacy School days, back when we had lived there the first time. Back when I got borned and moved away a year later. Now, eight years later, we were here for Law School. That's my dad. He introduced us to the pharmacy era man. And, shortly after that, the President's face introduced us to the magic we'd all been waiting for.

It was all over in less than five seconds. The speed of the motorcade robbed us of the lingering gazes we'd unknowingly been practicing when reading all those issues of Look and Life. We wanted to breathe the very puffs of steam exhaled by the President's warm body into the November chill. Both of them. My father to this very day, some fourty-three years later, always recounts the scenario thus: "He went around the corner on two wheels! All we got to say was, 'Hey! It's J.F.; we never got to say the K.'" Even so, we came away feeling happy and hopeful, proud and content.

In May of 1975 I took a cross country on a Honda 550 Four. I rode from Turlock, California, over Tioga Pass just east of Yosemite, dumped the bike at a stop sign in the snow, and continued on, feeling somewhat scathed, to my destination---noneother than Dealey Plaza. My anadromous journey had taken me to the redd of my lost innocence.

I stood at the spot. The very spot. November 22, 1963 was again. What happened here made Mrs. Ritzman, my fourth grade teacher, a Mormon, cry. What happened here made me, when I was only nine, cry. I remembered the tears of Walter Cronkeit when he announced the confirmation of death in black and white. What happened on this spot made Walter Cronkeit cry. I was standing on the epicenter of an event that shocked the world, an event that changed the entire course of history.

I looked up to the 6th floor window of the building located at 411 Elm Street. It was so close. I was so there. I walked up to the grassy knoll and surveyed the view any second gunman may have taken in. The fence was still there. It all looked so familiar. Like nothing had changed. It occurred to me that this was finally all the lingering gaze I would get. The gaze for which I had been consigned to settle. Not the one I had hoped for from the eyes of a nine year old boy. I stood on that spot and remembered my family. And then I thought of all those waiting Texan faces. I pictured the stunned contortions no one among that crowd in their wildest dreams had practiced for. I wept.

I was shedding tears on the very spot that had made my nine year old face join the contortions of the world on that early Texas afternoon. I cried for that boy who had waited with his family on another November day back in 1963, waited in the joyful expectation of gazing in person on the face of the President of the United States. "The last time I saw him," I thought, "he was still breathing." It struck me that those people who were standing where I was standing now could not say the same. So I wept for them as well.

A time of confidences.

I have never seen another President since.



















Time it was, and what a time it was. It was, a time of innocence. A time of confidences. Long ago, it must be. I have that photograph. Preserve that memory. It's all that's left me.