Anniversaries

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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.

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The Chicago skyline as seen from the Museum Campus in January 2013

23 years ago this week, my parents and I packed up our house in the Chicago suburbs and moved about 500 miles southwest to a farm on the western edge of Kansas City, Kansas. There were so many different aspects to that move from an opportunity for a different sort of life to the chance that I could grow up with my maternal cousins. In the years since we’ve had all that and more. Still, for the first 20 years I approached this anniversary with a bit of a sour attitude.

I was excited at first at the prospect of moving to a farm, to a place where we’d have horses and all sorts of pets (back then I was really into cowboys as well as dinosaurs like your typical 6-year-old). But as time passed and I began to realize what it meant to be living on a farm on the outskirts of a metropolitan city away from so many of the things I’d come to know and love back in Chicago, I developed a sense of gloom about the whole story.

It took until my mid-twenties for me to fully appreciate how wonderful a city Kansas City is, and how much it had really become my home. As the twentieth anniversary of the big move approached in 2019, I was back in Chicago for a week for probably the first time as an adult returning to my original hometown for business rather than on a family trip. At that point I seemed to be on the verge of securing a position back in that city and felt like all my hopes of the previous two decades were finally coming true. That job didn’t end up panning out, and besides a quick overnight stop in the suburbs on a long drive west to Kansas City from Upstate New York in October 2020, I haven’t been back to the city of my birth yet this decade.

When I was there in January 2019 attending the American Historical Association’s annual conference, I paused here and there between things to reflect on the life I might have had if we’d stayed. Now as an adult having gone through academia I wonder if I might be in a more advantageous position today professionally if I’d gone to high school and college up there rather than down here. Don’t misunderstand me, my education at St. James and Rockhurst was wonderful and something I’ll always treasure. Still, the opportunities of things to study, especially in the sciences, are far greater there than here. In fact, I wonder if I would be in a different field today if we had stayed there than here: planetary science, paleontology, geology, who knows, maybe even anthropology.

It’s curious to me that my interest in history didn’t really begin until after the move to Kansas City. In Chicago we were members of the Field Museum, a cultural icon that we visited easily once or twice every month. My fascination with the past was born in those hallowed halls, first for dinosaurs and in more recent years for the ancient megafauna of the Pleistocene and for anthropology. Without that steady anchor in the natural sciences to keep my interest I began to turn to other things like Roman and later medieval history as well as linguistics.

In many ways, that move impacted me far greater than any other event in my life so far. I became the guy I am today because of it. The guy in the classroom with more complicated loyalties and interests, the one with two favorite baseball teams (the Cubs and the Royals). Yet I’ve realized in recent years that I accentuated the fact that I’m not a native Kansas Citian for a good long while because it was something I could use to stand out from the crowd. Though rather than it being just a bunch of grandstanding, that fact of my life is one of the deepest and most personal parts of my story. Loyalty is something I treasure above all, and my own loyalty to my original hometown, even after 23 years, remains strong. To me, for example, abandoning the Cubs would be like turning my back on a core part of my identity.

That passion is helped by the fact that those first six years contain many of my best memories, like the April Fool’s Day when my Mom woke me up to a clear sky and said, “I took the day off work, and I’m keeping you out of school today. Let’s go to the Brookfield Zoo.” Or the time when some relatives were visiting, and I rode with my Aunt Kay in the back of my parents’ Ford Explorer down the Eisenhower Expressway so all of us could go see the then brand-new Michael Jordan statue outside the United Center. There are the times when I got to go visit my grandparents with my Dad up in Mt. Prospect, or the times when he took me on the Metra downtown to go to the Field Museum (again, that old museum). There are all the summer days we spent on our sailboat, the Arctic Tern, out on Lake Michigan up and down the Chicago lakefront and out to where the skyline fell below the western horizon.

You can understand why then for 20 years I felt like I was missing something from my life. After we moved to Kansas City we went from the big towers and expansive museums and endless suburban streets to big open skies, beautiful sunsets, and days spent remembering what we had before we left the place that to me still felt most like home. I think the farm wasn’t ever really going to feel like home to me, it was too quiet, and as an only child out there I was pretty lonely. Only after we moved into Brookside, the neighborhood where my Mom grew up, did Kansas City really feel like a place where I belonged.

Still, as much as I may grumble about the move it has also brought so many wonderful and dear people into my life. I got to know most of my family after moving to Kansas City, all my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my Mom’s side. I also made many dear friends in school and in daily life, including some who have been a part of this podcast so far and my brothers in the Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Kansas. I would not have gotten to know my dogs and cats and other pets if it weren’t for the move. I learned to love my best friend Noel, departed a year ago this month, and became a far better, kinder, and gentler person because of her presence in my life. Kansas City has given me so much, and made me who I am today.

Now as an adult I can see many different paths ahead of me, some of which lead back to that great lakefront metropolis, the beating heart of the Midwest. Others lead me back here to the Fountain City that I’ve adopted as home after a long and sometimes begrudging trial period. Some see me keep working out in the East in one of those great cities, and still more see me move out West to California or stay closer to home in Colorado. Nevertheless, today I could conceivably decide to fly up to Chicago for the day and go walk around those museums and streets that I remember so fondly from my youth. For me the Field Museum today is as much a place of scientific wonder as it is a place of wonderful memories. I’m still a member there, even though I haven’t actually visited in three years. (Thanks, COVID!)The Ancient Greeks had an understanding of time that we are always facing backwards to the past with the future still over our shoulders. I like that idea both as a historian and as a passionate person with a still young life filled with memories. What can I say, I’m always in a sentimental mood.

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