2025. Things I want to do. Things I need to do. I need to go outside late at night and see stars on the dark sky behind the treetops, behind my favorite treetops. This is something I can do. I know this is something I can still do, regardless of my bad knees. I can sit, and look up. I want to look up and see the snowflakes falling at me from above.
I want to walk down the snowy street and see if Christmas wreaths are still hanging in the windows on that house on the corner. I didn’t see the tree in the window this year like it’s always been these last years. And I want to see the wreaths, at least.
I need to see if my place in the shade is still there. I need it to be there. I can’t even say how much I need it to be there. I need to walk down by the creek where the dragonflies hang over the water in July and glisten in the late day sun. I need to go to that place where I saw a little bit of heaven…once.
You can anticipate this one. Words we’ve all been carrying around in our heads since 1969/70, as if the Rolling Stones are where we want to go for words to live by. You can’t always get what you want, honey, you can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. [From the Rolling Stones album, Let It Bleed, 1969.]
I’ve counted several times, and yes, November 1963 was sixty years ago. Those were days when the world experienced sadness in a terrible collective way. It was a time when kids had nuclear drills in school, when people were supposed to have fall-out shelters in their backyards. (We didn’t. We had a cellar with a metal cabinet, where we stored canned vegetables.) It was a year past the Cuban Missile Crisis, when my family huddled around this same TV set and listened to President Kennedy tell us about submarines and nuclear weapons. And we were a few scarce weeks away from hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and discovering The Beatles.
When I was little, we went to 12 o’clock mass on Sundays. That’s what it was called, 12 o’clock mass. Back then Catholics didn’t sing the same songs as Protestants. Some songs were Catholic songs and some were not. My recollection, anyhow. Like the Catholic Lord’s Prayer was different from the Protestant Lord’s Prayer. Although we called it the Our Father. In the confessional box, the last words from the priest were always, “For your penance, say five Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.”
It so happened that while we were getting ready for 12 o’clock mass on Sundays, there was a cartoon show on TV called Davy and Goliath. Davy was a little boy with a dog, Goliath, and the show had a religious theme of some sort. I liked the show but I never got to see the end because we left for church about fifteen minutes before it was over. The intro music for that show was A Mighty Fortress, and since then I’ve always loved that song. I think as a kid I found the words impressive. Mighty and cruel hate and Sabaoth. Abideth and doth. And the melody was sort of compelling. But I knew it wasn’t a song we ever sang in church.
One Sunday in November, Davy and Goliath was pre-empted, or maybe it was interrupted. It was that weekend when almost all the shows were pre-empted. Back then, breaking news was truly breaking news. As it turned out, that week, the previous Friday, my parents had to go to the funeral home because one of my uncles had died. I suppose I was young enough I didn’t have to go with them. When it came time for my parents to return home, some aunts and uncles were with them. I guess to pick up their kids, my cousins, who stayed at our house too that Friday. With the oldest in charge. When the grown-ups walked in the house, in their Sunday best funeral home clothes, all the kids, including me, and the cousins, were jumping up and down on the beds. I don’t know how it started. I guess it just looked like fun. The grown-ups were so angry. I’m not sure this is important, but it is the context for me that following Sunday.
My memory is that we were getting ready to leave for church on Sunday and the TV was still on. I think we all looked at the screen because they were going to show the guy who killed President Kennedy. We were standing in the living room watching and could see a lot of people in camera view, and they brought a man out in handcuffs. I remember thinking something like, “Is that him?” It seemed seconds later, one of the men on the bottom of the screen moved toward the prisoner, poked a gun into the suspect’s waist, and shot him. Right there, on TV while we watched.
Kennedy was just killed a few days earlier. Now, there we are in our living room, the guy who shot Kennedy was already caught, and some other man walks up to him in the middle of the press and the police, and shoots him dead. It seemed nobody even moved to stop the shooter. It was surreal. I’m sure I didn’t know that word back then. But it was the feeling we’d all had that whole creepy weekend. Surely, someone would come on TV and tell us some story other than Kennedy was dead. I think we expected them to say they got it wrong. It was a practice or a drill maybe, or somebody else was killed and they just thought it was Kennedy. Or they thought Kennedy died, but he was really still alive. Well, that didn’t happen. Now it was two days later, and they were saying this guy we just saw on TV got through the crowd and shot the suspect. The suspect who shot the president. Huh??
I was thinking, “Can we all go back to Davy and Goliath and A Mighty Fortress?”
But no, we turned off the TV that Sunday, piled in the car, and went off to 12 o’clock mass.
etikser 