JFK

Impossibly Close

my dad’s ansco
camera image reversed
reflecting, recording
a sunny sunday morning
hyannis, old cape cod
the president prince
our jackie veiled
emerge from church
impossibly close
to crowds in silent awe
salt air electric
blue smokey
flash bulbs popping
super eight cameras
clicking, panning
string neckties
and netted hats
camelot’s couple
approach the shiny
leather seated limos
but wait
she gets in
but he
motions those squinting
men who guard and serve
he’ll drive today
and off they go
compound bound
impossibly close
to me




My heart is heavy with memories of those awful Four Days in 1963 when I was 14 and felt childhood's innocence slip away in an instant. Our man from Massachusetts who spoke with our accent was impossibly gone, my mother's tears streaming down her face when I got off that school bus. What I didn't believe was terribly true.Walter Cronkite and the flickering black and white Philco that would be on for hours in a house where that never had happened before. The blur of Saturday and that Sunday morning shock at my grandparent's house after a sleep over. Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down before my eyes on live TV in a Dallas jail hallway, the world gone mad. The National Day of Mourning Monday, I can still see the cortege, hear the hooves of those shining horses bearing the flag draped casket, the muffled drumbeats. I see the magnificently black nervous one with no rider. A baby boy saluting in his baby blue coat. The young President who guided us through the Cuban Missile Crisis with me huddled in bed, terrified with my new for my 13th birthday transistor radio pressed to my ear. How could he be gone? My brother's friend with the fallout shelter in the backyard, what about us? What about Caroline and John-John, and Jackie?

Nothing was ever the same, I grew up that day. Obviously I see him differently today, my childhood rosy glasses gone. Those shocking days are still a part of me as are the Beatles who, as an NPR columnist wrote, bookend those days.

For the Record,
This day came in rainy and dark. We're tired today.

All hands are healthy.

Blip 1300, no gaps or back blips

The Ansco camera that took this shot.