Before leaving for work Sunday, my parents sat together in
the kitchen, conducting their post-church activities of eating breakfast and
watching the news.
Slinging on my jacket and picking up my briefcase at the
other end of the kitchen, I was getting ready to head out the door when a
feature on the 50th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination
came on.
My parents watched as they sipped their Wawa coffee and
spread cream cheese on their bagels.
As it ended, my dad asked my mom, “Where were you when you
heard about it?”
“I was in typing class,” my mom replied.
“I was in school,” Dad said.
“Well, so was I. I was in class,” Mom reiterated. They do
that sometimes.
At this point, I turned back around. I wasn’t going to get
to the newsroom as early as I wanted to, but I realized I’d never asked them
about this before. And, apparently, my parents, married for 26 years, hadn’t
asked each other.
They’d been in their early teens at the time, my dad in a
parochial school in Philadelphia, my mom in another Catholic school in a small
town north of Pittsburgh, hundreds of miles apart.
“They just told us that he’d been shot,” Mom said.
“I was in class and someone came in and told us all to come
to the church to pray,” Dad said.
The students were hustled to the church and prayed for a
while for the country’s first-ever Catholic president. My dad didn’t say how
long.
“Then someone came in and said he’d died,” Dad conlduing,
only adding, “And then we stopped.”
A quiet moment passed.
Picking up a circular from the newspaper, my dad pointed to
one of the colored ads promoting a sale.
“Naval oranges, $2 a pound,” he said to my mom, with a
renewed cheeriness.
“Oh, we’ll have to get some,” my mom replied, taking my
dad’s offering to come out of the dark past.
The television went to a commercial touting “Meet the Press.”
I said goodbye, which seemed to remind my parents that I was there, and left
for work.
