It was 45 years ago, on a Friday. I was taking a nap. I was four years-old. I knew who President Kennedy was, the way my four-year old today knows who President-elect Obama is (Lee thought he was President already when Lee saw him on TV this summer. When told he wasn't yet, Lee informed me that he was "practicing to be President."). My parents were (are) both Democrats, and his picture was in the newspapers and on TV frequently. We had glass milk bottles delivered to our Brooklyn, NY, garden apartment, in a steel milk box that held six bottles in two rows of three, and the cardboard caps to the bottles each showed a President's likeness, his sequential number, and the years he was President. JFK's was listed as "1961-." I heard the phone ring, and my mother's muffled sobbing into the phone. I stayed in my bed, but I knew that something was very wrong.
When she finally came in to get me, she told me what had happened. I had a hard time with it. Eisenhower was frail; Kennedy was stocky and strong. How could a bullet kill him? My mother kept saying "Oh shoot! Oh shoot!" over and over again. I kept wondering why she would say that when he was just shot, but I wisely kept that thought to myself. I remember seeing John-John salute the flag-draped casket in the Capitol Rotunda. I didn't know what the Capitol was, nor a Rotunda, but I did know who the First Lady and her two children were -- everyone did. I asked what was under the flag. My father told me that it was the President's body. I was confused. I would have thought that a box holding the a corpse would be shaped like a person, with two legs, two arms, et cetera. To this 4 year-old, we had arms, legs, a head, and our body. The body was the torso. The rectangular box was torso-shaped. I wondered out loud where the arms, legs and head went, but no one answered and I didn't press the issue. I remember being very upset that my cartoons weren't on TV and that all that was on the air were adults talking about things I didn't understand. I also remember watching the funeral, with the riderless horse and the 21 gun salute. In a few weeks, the first President Johnson milk cap entered our home, and Kennedy's was completed with "1963" following the dash. The local gas station gave out drinking glasses if you bought enough gas, with inspiring words from Kennedy's inaugural address. Idlewild became JFK International Airport. I had no idea how much had really changed, though. After all, I was only four years-old. And no one of any age knew at that moment how often a bullet would change our world over the rest of that decade. And now my four-year old, who has no real memory of Bush, though I've pointed him out on TV a few times, knows only President Obama, who as President-elect is, it seems, still practicing.