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2002-11-22 - 5:53 a.m.

Today marks the 39th anniversary of JFK's assassination.

I was in junior high the day Walter Cronkite told the world Kennedy had been assassinated. I've lived through a legion of memories in those 39 years--some gratifying, others unpleasant. I've embraced and retained some of those memories; a multitude of others have decayed and are forgotten. The memory of the moment I first heard the startling announcement of Kennedy's death is not one I've forgotten. The image has been fixed in my head for almost 40 years.

I was in the dressing room following a basketball game. A shabby, long and narrow room sliced by scarred gray metal lockers and wooden benches. Dull green paint chipping off the walls, the dark green floor enamel worn bare, exposing raw cement in large patches. We were all there: Sally and Di and Glenda and Kathy and Patti and me, our faces flushed from the game. The stench of our bodies mixing with the heavy smell of disinfectant in the windowless room. Our uniforms--burgundy shorts and white cotton tops--wrinkled and stained with perspiration.

Our youthful laughter died when our physical education teacher gathered us on the benches and delivered the news. I remember not so much a feeling of sorrow as a sense of confusion--not really grasping or understanding what I'd been told. Looking to the teacher for an explanation. Later, with my parents, I watched the events in Dealy Square replay on television. On the following Sunday, my mother and father and I and my aunt and uncle and cousins were cramped into my grandmother's small living room. We were gathered there for Sunday dinner, and the house was redolent of pot roast and homemade rolls and pumpkin pie. My two cousins and I were playing Gin Rummy on the living room floor when we witnessed Jack Ruby step from the crowd of law enforcement officials and reporters in Dallas, extend a gun toward Lee Harvey Oswald and pull the trigger.

A remarkably vivid and permanent memory. A recollection of my circumstances during a tragic time in history. The news didn't affect me personally, but the events were significant enough for the snapshot to stay with me for nearly four decades.

Flashbulb memories.

The afternoon I received the call telling me my father had died is frozen forever in photographic form in my head, unaffected by the ravages of time that erode and degrade most other memories. I have no memory of the day prior to the life-altering call, but that moment is as clear now as it was that cold March afternoon. Piles of line-edited articles on my desk, black and white photos scattered on a long table under the long, mullioned windows on my left. My navy blazer was draped across a folding chair in the corner. My assistant was across the room, her nails clicking on the computer keyboard. Her dress black wool. That noon we had brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and the office carried the thick aroma of coffee left to simmer and scorch.

My hand choking the phone receiver, a palpable cold enveloping me. An encroaching fear of a world gone wrong. The backdrop nebulous and going to slow motion. My mother's hysterical crying deep in the handset, beyond reach, somewhere behind the nurse who was talking to me. Three dark and dazed hours in the car, the passing fields, rivers, rolling hills and small towns misty and unfocused.

Finally, the intimate cocoon of my parents’ home. Warm, accepting, constant. The smell indelible and familiar. And then a headlong decent into the cruel reality; a hard, unforgiving fist smashing into my heart. Everything was changed now. This place would never again be the same. Irreplaceable loss. Grief, personal and intense. Uncompromising anger. Guilt, unsettling and inexplicable.

The past persists.

Unfortunately, the human mind can accurately preserve emotionally traumatic events. Pleasant, less painful and mundane experiences are distorted, often lost. There is no flashbulb mechanism in the brain, and these images are not encoded any differently than any others. Yet, even though the bruising pain of the event fades with time, the trauma, the level of emotional arousal and the stress involved, along with our frequent rehearsal of the event, makes the memory graphic, accurate and enduring.

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