There are perhaps half a dozen events during my life that were so extraordinarily shocking and momentous in what those events meant that my memory of the moment of hearing the news was indelibly engraved on my memory.
The news that President Jack Kennedy had been shot in Dallas is one of those. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing -- fifty years later, it's like the moment was preserved in amber.
The same was true when I heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, about President Franklin Roosevelt's sudden death from a stroke, and the explosion on takeoff of the Challenger spacecraft in 1986. I'm sure it would have been the same if I had been alive when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
But it's not just calamities and losses. There's something about sudden, momentous, life-altering news that we preserved in memory. I also have an etched memory of where I was when the news that Atlanta had been selected as the host city for the 1996 Olympics. Or the end of World War II.
With the Kennedy assassination, it was not just November 22. We were glued to our tv sets for days afterward, participating in a united grieving. And they played the Adagietta from Mahler's 5th Symphony, over and over. I can hear it now, with its combination of stunning beauty and immense sadness.
So those days feel very real to me today.
Ralph
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