Thinking about Thanksgiving and also JFK.

Today is November 23, which means that yesterday was November 22.

Until a few years ago, the date November 22 meant little to me—only that it was time to make sure I’d figured out a birthday present for my father, whose birthday is November 28.

But ever since I began working on my biography of John Kennedy, I’ve always felt a strange emotion on November 22. That was the day he died—November 22, 1963.

My feeling isn’t sorrow, exactly…Kennedy was shot before I was born, and to me that event seems so historically inevitable that I don’t really feel sorrow.

It’s more of a sense of being reminded of the awesome workings of fate—how swiftly everything can change, how the most ordinary day can turn into a life’s turning point.

And this year, with Thanksgiving falling so early, that emotion has carried over until today. I’m grateful for all my good fortune. And I’m mindful of being grateful, too, for all the bad fortune that passed me by: the doctor’s report that came back “negative,” the near miss on a bridge on an icy road, the time the Big Girl dreamily walked out into the traffic on Park Avenue before I could stop her.

“She thought again of how dangerous it was to live even for one day.” --Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Comments

[Jude]

I was 8 when JFK was shot. I'd voted for him in the 1960 election because my mother was an election judge that year and brought home a sample ballot. My dad teased me that I voted for him because JFK was so handsome, but I probably chose him because my dad did. We heard about the assassination when we were at school, and they gave us 3 days of vacation because of it. My mother said to the three of us, "You should watch TV--this is an historic event" which is why I was watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I watched TV for most of the three days, but it blurs together. I remember the funeral procession, though. The assassination was a traumatic start to the upheaval of the 1960s, with more assassinations ahead.

[Pat]

One of the reefs Gretchen is navigating on this project is the danger of platitudes. So many humans have treated this subject so casually that the deep thinking sounds like the shallow thinking. So with little hope of penetrating that strange blanket, I gently remind you from the "other" side of it: you, yes you: your world can change from normal, routine, unappreciated, to a strange new razor's-edge life of adrenaline and panic (and appreciation) literally in the space of a 6-minute routine doctor's exam. The child walking dreamily into heavy traffic is an even better example.