November 22, 2023
Today is the sixtieth
anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 60 years! That’s
hard for me to wrap my head around, likely because there are moments from that
day that I recall so vividly.
I was a nine-year-old child in
1963, a fourth grader in a three-room school about a half a mile from my home
in rural southern Ontario, Canada. Probably but for the major event in my life
earlier that same year, the death of the American president would not have
impacted me so strongly. But that other event had happened, and it had been the
first, and most brutal piece of reality of four brutal pieces of reality that I
believe most profoundly shaped me before I became an adult.
Going to school for me was a
matter of walking. Looking back on that time in my life, I have snippets of
memory, but only that. I don’t recall walking to school or back home again as a
regular thing that I did, but I know it was how I got to school almost every
day. I remember flashes of the playground. I recall the day I fell and split my
head open against the post of the outside door, and my parents had to take me
to the doctor to get stitches.
But for the most part, I
remember two days with specificity during that year. I recall the day in
January of 1963, the second day back after the Christmas break, when my Uncle
Howard came to pick me up from school. I was surprised, wondering why he was
there from all the way over in Brantford.
He’d picked me up to take me
home because my father had died a couple of hours before.
And I remember the day, just
ten months later that Miss Ritchie, the other teacher at my school, knocked on
our classroom door, crying, because the American president had been shot.
We were sent home early that
day—not a lot early, but there were no school busses at our school, we all
walked, so we all walked home when sent.
I recall my mother telling me
the next week, as we watched the President’s funeral on television, that
President Kennedy had been nearly the same age as my daddy. I remember that
because it was the first time my mother had mentioned my father’s death since
it had happened.
Death really impacted my
childhood, and in fact, the rest of my life. I don’t think I actually had much
of a childhood after my father died. I was the youngest of three ranging in age
from 8 to 18. I became more serious and very interested in American politics. I
was 14 the year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were
assassinated. I do remember, at the time, believing that life as we had known
it was over: the world was going to hell in the proverbial hand basket. Why
care about what you would be when you grew up when there was nothing in our
future but death and destruction?
Somehow, however, I grew out
of that teenaged-angst stage. I left childhood behind and turned out to be only
slightly neurotic, prone to expecting my loved ones to die at any moment. But otherwise,
I became a relatively normal adult.
We who are alive right now
cannot possibly analyze what the events in our own lifetimes mean in the larger
story of our humanity. True analysis depends upon possessing a certain amount
of objectivity which we’re simply not capable of attaining when it comes to our
own times. Therefore, we must blindly leave
it to some future chronicler of events to weigh in on how major milestones
shaped the world, going forward.
We can look back over our own
development and make some guesses as to how we ourselves have been shaped by our
own experiences. Yet we do so without certainty. Our emotional perspective will
always cloud our ability to see the details clearly.
At this point in my life,
however, I can honestly say one thing. I believe that as a result of so many
losses over the course of my lifetime I have become more appreciative, more thankful
for the people and the relationships I’ve been fortunate to have in my life.
And I hope I never stop having an attitude of gratitude.
I wish my American friends a
Happy Thanksgiving.
Love,
Morgan
https://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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