Sixty Years – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week on the Wednesday Blog, recognizing the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.
Bill Clinton was the first president who I can remember, and like many other millennials my perspective on the Presidency is shaped by his two terms in office. Yet beyond the immediate I always knew several other presidents: Lincoln (as I often write), Washington, Truman, and Kennedy. Of all of these, John Kennedy is the most complicated; he was the first Irish American Catholic to be elected to the White House and his picture was still pretty common in houses even into the turn of the millennium. His term is remembered most nostalgically of all the presidencies of recent memory for how short it was and abruptly it ended.
As much as I always knew who the Kennedy brothers were, I also knew that Dallas was the city where President Kennedy died. When I first visited in my adolescent years, I made a point of going to visit Dealey Plaza and see where it all happened. Every year on this day I find myself thinking of what happened there 29 years before I was born. It’s strange how much events that are relatively removed from my own lifetime still have such an impact on how I see things. For me the recent past still goes back to the turn of the twentieth century when the world that I was born into in the Midwest was being created. So, as far as the assassination of President Kennedy is from my own life, those 29 years still have never felt that distant.
Today, this particular anniversary is striking to me because it is becoming more distant. 1963 is now a full 60 years removed from our own time, and as I look ahead the middle of this century seems closer than I ever imagined before. The passage of time could well drive people to fear for their own mortality, and to a certain extent I find those thoughts enter my mind now and again. Yet when I worry about my future it’s less that I will lose something of myself with the passing years and more that the memories I’ve grown up hearing and those I’ve written for myself will become ever more remote from my lived experience.
For the last several years I’ve found myself caught by a faint memory of a sort of reddish glow. I’ve known it originated at some point in the early 2000s, about 20 years ago for those who are counting, yet beyond that I could only speculate. I figured there might’ve been some phase of interest in Renaissance Italy in the books or documentaries my parents were reading or watching around that time, yet I couldn’t remember any specifics. Then, several weeks ago, I remembered some faces along with that red glow and it occurred to me that what I’ve been longing for was a particular day, Thanksgiving Day 2003.
That year, my Kane grandparents and great-aunt Sr. Therese came down to Kansas City to attend my Webelo bridge-crossing ceremony when I graduated into the Boy Scouts. They patiently followed my parents and I around town, attending a weeknight fencing lesson of mine (I used to fence saber), and joining all of my maternal Kansas City relatives for Thanksgiving dinner at the farmhouse that my parents built. We lived on 34 acres of land in western Kansas City, Kansas and one thing we all miss about that house is the view to the west out the back windows. The sunsets were gorgeous. That Thanksgiving was a clear day with light clouds in the sky and as dinner was nearing completion, I remember sitting with my grandparents and Sister (that’s what we all called my great-aunt) in the living room with something on the TV, but our eyes were drawn to the sunset out the window.
The backside of our house was all one big room, to the right was the kitchen, in between the kitchen table, and to the left the living room, and in the kitchen, we had these beautiful imported red Italian wooden cabinets which my parents saw on This Old House and bought in a stall at the Merchandise Mart before we left Chicago. The beautiful shades of red that I remember are of the sunset shining off of those cabinets, a true marriage of nature and craft that I hope I will never forget.
My Kane grandparents and Sister are all gone now, the only ones in the room at the time that memory occurred who were alive when President Kennedy was killed, yet for all of us that moment marked our time as one of uncertainty. Now, as an adult I appreciated Jack Kennedy still, yet I would’ve rather voted for his younger brother Bobby. I see more of the nuance in those colors even when as a child on Thanksgiving 2003 all I saw was bright light that made me uncomfortable.
Sixty years isn’t that long, and yet to an extent it really is. Sixty years before President Kennedy’s assassination the country was recovering from President McKinley’s assassination, a bleak start to the twentieth century in a moment of triumph and seeming progress. It’s all about where we stand in the great cycle of years. I like the old adage that the Greeks saw time differently from us, that they stood looking towards the past with the future behind them. We don’t know what will happen in the future and our pasts and those of our parents and grandparents really shape our worlds in far greater ways than we can often imagine.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 