IF ONLY......

 

 From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Yesterday, Sunday, November 22, 2020, was a day fit only for hellcats here in Central Ohio. Blustery, wet, gray—the day mirrored my mood from rising to retiring. “If only it had been such a day in Dallas fifty-seven years ago!” the nagging voice whirled like dervishes unchecked in my brain. “If only it had rained and President John F. Kennedy had been in a closed car rather than the open one…his beautiful head would have been shielded from Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer bullet.”

            In my long life I have lived through my wedding day; the birth of my son; the birth of my daughter; my children’s various illnesses; my divorce; the death of both of my parents and of my brother and of my sister; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr and of Bobby Kennedy; the Vietnam War and violent domestic protests against it; 9/11; more surgeries than I can count on both hands; but no hours loom as starkly in my memory as those that opened at mid-day of Friday, November 22, 1963, the day my fellow Americans and I were struck dumb by the news that John F. Kennedy, our president, had been assassinated.   

            Basking in the unseasonably bright and warm day in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, my co-worker and I strolled leisurely from our lunch at a nearby café to our work in the credit department located on an upper floor of the towering Uni-Card building. We approached the crowd of loitering co-workers on the broad sidewalk fronting the building and then joined in the pitter-patter and joking so typical of New Yorkers at their ease. The lively drumbeat of chatter stopped abruptly when a man rushed out of the broad entrance of the building, his hand clutching a long white ribbon of tickertape that trailed in his wake, and his voice shouting, “THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT! THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT!” In the blink of an eye, a second man ran from the building. It was his duty to tell us that the president was dead, that the city was closing down as was the case across the country, and that we were dismissed to get to our homes as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The one detail missing from my memory is the means by which I made it to the one-bedroom apartment in Flushing, Queens, New York, in which my bridegroom and I had taken up residence only three months before. Perched on the floor of our living room, our noses only inches from our small black and white television, my husband and I watched nearly motionless, other than bathroom and kitchen breaks, the unfolding drama of the several days comprising JFK’s assassination: the tragic motorcade, the chaotic manhunt, Oswald’s frenzied apprehension, and then, the man in the scruffy fedora crashing through the mad crowd, raising his gun-yielding arm and shooting Oswald dead…right there on the TV screen…right before our stunned eyes—the blood-smeared pink suit, the vice-president’s swearing in, the flag-draped casket, the funeral procession with the riderless horse, the little son stepping forward and saluting his dead father.

            To my mind, that condensed period was unmatched in modern history, until now…this now when 250,000 Americans, doubtless most of whom have died needlessly of Covid-19 in a period of nine months; when we watched another assassination on our TV screens…right before our stunned eyes; when our streets erupted in protests; when a pitiless, remorseless, brutal, sitting President of the United States is trying his hardest to destroy our democracy. If only noon of January 20, 2021 were tomorrow.©

#11/22/1963, #John F. Kennedy, #JFK, #assassination, #Lee Harvey Oswald, #bloodstainedpinksuit, #Covid-19, #George Floyd, #1/20/2021, #Joe Biden, #POTUS

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase on Amazon.com.