Part IX: Unhappy Anniversary
It has occurred to El Hyena that our nation is approaching a momentous anniversary. Two weeks from today, another Friday, many people will stop what they’re doing and think back fifty years. They will remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about something horrible and unthinkable and, for some, incomprehensible.
El Hyena was in the second grade in Mrs. Heflin’s class at Clarkston Elementary School in Tyler, Texas. At some point during the day (El Hyena is a little fuzzy on whether it was morning or afternoon, but he’s old and addled now) another teacher burst through the door into our classroom. She was crying and started whispering to our teacher, who then started crying herself. They both ran out into the hall to join other teachers, all of whom were crying. Neither El Hyena nor any other of his fellow second graders had any idea what was going on, but figured it must be something bad. After all, none of us had ever seen Mrs. Heflin cry before, and she taught second graders.
After a little while Mrs. Heflin (being as how it was 1963, there was no such word as “Ms.”) came back into the room and told us our parents would come get us and take us home. At this point, no one had told us anything but we all figured getting to leave school early was a pretty good deal. All of us kids were standing outside on the sidewalk, and a big line of cars was moving slowly through the circle drive, each picking up a kid or two at a time, and driving off. The teachers were still crying.
Then El Hyena saw Imogene, the very nice lady who looked after El Hyena and his little brother until our Mom came home later in the afternoon. El Hyena’s mother was a teacher at another elementary school. Imogene was also crying, and it was she who told El Hyena what was going on. When she told El Hyena the President had been assassinated, El Hyena asked her “What’s assassinated mean ?”; when told, El Hyena’s reaction was “Really ?”. Remember, El Hyena was too young to have said “No sh@# ?”.
When El Hyena got home his little brother was already there. El Hyena asked his little brother if he had any idea what this was all about, but he was no help. Then the Folks came home and, although both were really stressed out, they sat down with us kids and tried to explain it to us. For the next several days, this was all that was on TV. One day, El Hyena and his Daddy were watching TV, where apparently lots of people were waiting for something to happen somewhere over in Dallas. We then saw a guy in a cowboy hat come into the picture leading some scrawny guy, and then some other guy pushes forward and sticks his arm towards the scrawny guy. At this point, El Hyena’s Daddy jumped off the couch and hollered something with which El Hyena was unfamiliar. El Hyena’s Daddy then explained what they had just seen on TV, but didn’t explain what all those words meant.
Of course, then we all watched more TV over the days to come, and it was mostly all about the same thing. Everybody was very sad, including El Hyena, who thought it appropriate that he also be sad. After awhile, it wasn’t on TV anymore, or at least not nearly as much. People still talked about it for a fairly long time, and everybody had their own idea about what had happened and why. Finally, everybody pretty much quit talking about it, so El Hyena figured things were back to “normal”.
Can you imagine what it would have been like if we’d have had the Internet back then ? Nowadays, everybody screams at everybody else on the Internet about everything that happens, whether it be what some politician or actor or football coach said, or what some actress wore to some banquet or as a Halloween costume, etc., etc.
Fifty years later, and since El Hyena is always interested in new books, he has noticed that many, many new books have come out about that president and what happened to him a long time ago. El Hyena has not read any of these new books, but he imagines they contain lots of re-thinking, re-hashing, re-examining, re-theorizing, and revising. There are apparently new movies coming out about it, but El Hyena will not go see any of those. He’ll probably read about them on the Internet.
But what do they know ? El Hyena is pretty sure that none of them were in Mrs. Heflin’s second grade class at Clarkston Elementary School in Tyler, Texas on November 22, 1963.
