Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The Haze of History
A light green ‘53’ Chevy station wagon roared down Lincoln Highway at Sunrise heading from Philadelphia to Washington for the funeral of John Kennedy. We were on a quest of participation inside significant history; there were bottles of cold black labels in a metal tub in the back seat covered by my grandmother’s Shaw which I gently pulled off of her on my way out of the house.
We may have been drunk by sunrise but there were no breathalyzers and no “legal limits” so who is to say? We passed on a two lane stretch but the car didn’t have a passing gear. We were hung out to dry, a head on collision seemed seconds away, we screamed and laughed and yelled “we’re dead” and maybe we did die and I’ve spent the rest of my life in heaven.
Stagger Lee was a popular song of the time as we all staggered around the capitol without a clue of an itinerary or where to stand or what was going to happen. I sat on a curb on the incline of the street leading to the Capitol rotunda. I knew the word rotunda which matched with my Aunt Rose and that’s all I knew.
I just sat and snoozed like Francis the Talking Mule in a stall. Sleep will alleviate a hangover, and I was never a longevity drinker, just a reckless beer blitzkrieg followed by napping.
A crowd seven deep flowed and filled in behind me. Somewhere close to high noon the horse wagon with the Casket rolled past my eyeballs. It stopped and I thought of the joke “anything here to stop this coffin” because that’s just how my brain works.
Then I looked slightly to the left, in through the lightly tinted back window on the right side of the black limousine. It was Jackie focused in sadness, pill box hat and black veil, she wasn’t gazing into the future or the past, she was capturing my face.
I looked back and for seconds we looked at each other, sadness is beautiful and attractive, nature’s latent message which says “go make another person, you just lost one.”
The crowd stirred, I turned around, there were people with “transistor radios” “Oswald has been shot” was shouted, “and he was most certainly dead.”
I turned back towards Jackie---she was always Jackie to me—but she was gone to grieve and she did not know what I knew about anything, or did she?
Note: I checked the facts and Oswald was shot at 11:40 Central time on November 24 and the funeral procession rolled to the rotunda from the White House at 12:40 Eastern time. I was looking at Jackie when the word hit the street that Oswald was killed and there’s no way she could have known not exactly being “transistor sister.” Ironically she would spend much of the rest of her life known as Jackie O.
We may have been drunk by sunrise but there were no breathalyzers and no “legal limits” so who is to say? We passed on a two lane stretch but the car didn’t have a passing gear. We were hung out to dry, a head on collision seemed seconds away, we screamed and laughed and yelled “we’re dead” and maybe we did die and I’ve spent the rest of my life in heaven.
Stagger Lee was a popular song of the time as we all staggered around the capitol without a clue of an itinerary or where to stand or what was going to happen. I sat on a curb on the incline of the street leading to the Capitol rotunda. I knew the word rotunda which matched with my Aunt Rose and that’s all I knew.
I just sat and snoozed like Francis the Talking Mule in a stall. Sleep will alleviate a hangover, and I was never a longevity drinker, just a reckless beer blitzkrieg followed by napping.
A crowd seven deep flowed and filled in behind me. Somewhere close to high noon the horse wagon with the Casket rolled past my eyeballs. It stopped and I thought of the joke “anything here to stop this coffin” because that’s just how my brain works.
Then I looked slightly to the left, in through the lightly tinted back window on the right side of the black limousine. It was Jackie focused in sadness, pill box hat and black veil, she wasn’t gazing into the future or the past, she was capturing my face.
I looked back and for seconds we looked at each other, sadness is beautiful and attractive, nature’s latent message which says “go make another person, you just lost one.”
The crowd stirred, I turned around, there were people with “transistor radios” “Oswald has been shot” was shouted, “and he was most certainly dead.”
I turned back towards Jackie---she was always Jackie to me—but she was gone to grieve and she did not know what I knew about anything, or did she?
Note: I checked the facts and Oswald was shot at 11:40 Central time on November 24 and the funeral procession rolled to the rotunda from the White House at 12:40 Eastern time. I was looking at Jackie when the word hit the street that Oswald was killed and there’s no way she could have known not exactly being “transistor sister.” Ironically she would spend much of the rest of her life known as Jackie O.
