The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is one of my earliest memories and remarkable in its clarity: I was 4 years old, too young to be in kindergarten, at home with my mother who, in all likelihood, was getting a head start on Thanksgiving pie crusts.
Then the ragman came to the door. The ragman, you wonder? I do, too. But there was, indeed, a ragman who came round to all the houses surely selling something other than rags, because couldn't everybody make their own out of worn shirts and old towels? I knew he looked old and scary, just what you might expect of a ragman. I don't know what it was he sold, least of all credibility.
So when he came to the door and told my mother that President Kennedy had been shot, she just assumed he was lying. Or delusional, not a word I would have known. She may have circled her finger at her temple to me to indicate that I shouldn't worry. The ragman wasn't right.
Still, she turned on the big console television to make sure.
But he was. He was right.
And what I remember most vividly — most viscerally — was feeling that now we were not safe. We were unsheathed. I could not have used that word then because, like "delusional," I wouldn't have known it.
But I felt as though some essential, protective layer had been flayed. I didn't know what it meant that our president had been shot dead. What I did know what that we were not safe. And it wasn't just the country. We weren't: my mother, my father, my two sisters, and me. And a great fear accompanied my certainty of that knowledge.
In the days ahead I remember seeing Lee Harvey Oswald shot, though whether it was as it happened or in a replay of the live footage, I don't know. I remember my sister telling how a classmate had recited "O Captain! My Captain!" — Walt Whitman's tribute to President Abraham Lincoln's death — "My Captain does not answer/his lips are pale and still,/My father does not feel my arm/He has no pulse nor will."
I remember the motorcade, the restless, riderless horse, the drums' mournful, endless cadence. I remember John-John, a little younger than I was, and Caroline, older, braver.
Most of all I remember that I wasn't confused; I was simply frightened and there was nothing ambiguous about my fear.
Just over three years later, my father died—not assassinated, of course. But he died fairly suddenly. And once more — and more strongly — I felt unsheathed, a deeper protective layer flayed. The difference this time, though, was that while the country had a new president and would continue to have new presidents, there would be no new father for me. Again, there was no ambiguity about this knowledge. And like the ragman, I was right.
Within the next year both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were gunned down.
Using a child's logic, I understood that they were not as important as the president and as my father—not to me, personally — but I was also coming to understand two things: the first was that we needed great men to protect us; the second was that great men could not be trusted not to die. Unlike Achilles, who only had to worry about his unbaptized heel, the real-life great men were nothing more than flesh and bone, and prone, unwittingly, to abandon when they were most needed.
And of course, raised as I was in a polyglot Lutheran/Roman Catholic home, there were ever the images of Jesus, on a crucifix or in hymn lyrics, being killed for being great, leaving bereft those who had sought his peerless protection.
I don't know if these early rattling losses, pock-marking the innocence of childhood, somehow drew me into ordained ministry — a profession and status which many denominations still deny to women. I just don't know.
Yet sometimes I wonder if I still carry with me a twinned and unvarnished childhood fear: that we need great men to protect us. And that we also need to be making other plans.
Jo Page's email address is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at >www.jo-page.com>.