President Kennedy was a hero in our house. Our family had an embroidered picture of JFK hanging in the living room and my brother had Kennedy’s portrait in his bedroom. We were inspired by our young Irish-Catholic King Arthur. I remember the night when my mother, brother, and I walked along the road, along acres of onion fields and orange trees, waving our “KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT” sign at passing cars. My brother was going to run for president himself someday. This was the deciding year—1960—when youth was invited to the future. Kennedy himself extended the invitation. He was a thrilling presence, even to me at five years old. His election meant so much to our family, as if our own efforts had helped change the direction of the future.
Two weeks after my ninth birthday, President Kennedy was murdered. I got sick and couldn’t go to school all week. I cried, we cried, everyone cried. There were tears in the voices of newscasters, tears in the eyes of strangers on the street. America cried for weeks and then we cried for years.
Something was lost that autumn that has never been returned to America. The land itself seemed to grieve, it rained everywhere all week long. Even when the winter sun finally came out, it seemed as if grief was now part of our collective language. My father was gone and our house seemed emptier than before.
Thanksgiving
It was Thanksgiving. I was in the same pajamas I’d worn all week. Mother took an extra shift at work because she got paid double on holidays. She told Danny and I, “I’ll be back at six or seven and we’ll have turkey together.”
“Danny, now listen to me, after you pat on the butter and sage, and stuff the bird—I already made the stuffing—then you put the turkey in the oven at 475 degrees for an hour, and then turn it down to 425 for the next three hours. Keep it covered.”
Danny felt confident he understood what needed to be done. “Don’t worry, Mom, I have everything under control.” He was laughing.
Mom left for work around 10:30, and an hour or two later he put the bird in the oven and set the temperature. Danny sent me out to watch television. Since Dad was a chef, it was important for Danny to do this right.
About two hours later Danny was checking on the bird but I was thinking, it doesn’t really smell like turkey. Sometime around 4 p.m. we were getting hungry, but the turkey was still raw. I looked at Danny and said, “Something’s wrong.” Indeed, the bird was just slightly brown, still cool inside.
Mom came home at dinnertime exhausted and hungry. As she looked at our turkey she said:
“What did you do here? What temperature did you set the oven to?”
“250.”
“I told you 450.”
She was mad. Dan said, “Well, let’s just turn it up.”
“You can’t turn it up now, it’s covered with bacteria.”
We all looked at the stove. We had waited six hours for turkey. Mother tried not to be mad when she took the bird out of the huge black iron baking pan and threw it in the garbage outside.
“I don’t have money to buy another one.”
That was another shock in this week of shocks. I never really knew we didn’t have enough money to buy food. There was nothing else to eat in the house, maybe peanut butter and jelly, maybe tuna fish. She had spent all her waitressing money on the turkey.
I was learning that life was not safe for anyone, at any time. Presidents could be killed, food could become deadly, holidays weren’t necessarily festive, and my family might not have enough to eat.
The next day I was playing out in the front yard when I told Gloria Moore from the hillbilly family across the street the news that we didn’t get any Thanksgiving because Danny messed up the turkey. I guess I was looking for a little sympathy or maybe I was bragging about how tough our family was. We don’t even eat turkey on Thanksgiving. Ha!
The Moore ladies overheard me and that night there was a knock at the kitchen door. Funny, I can still see them, Gloria’s mother and her aunt holding big platters of food: turkey, gravy, green beans, and mincemeat pie. They backed away as my mother opened the door.
“We heard about what happened and we have so much food, we thought Rickie Lee and Danny would enjoy some turkey dinner. Please accept it, we just won’t ever eat it all.” I could see under the foil—a turkey leg, sweet potatoes.
“Thank you,” Mama said, “but we cannot accept this.” She said it so fast I didn’t believe what I’d heard. She was angry again, angry they brought food.
“Oh, but . . . we have too much.”
“No, I mean it, Mrs. Moore. We do not accept charity.”
Mom closed the kitchen door. Danny looked at her, but I was looking out the window at that plate of mashed potatoes. The ladies were still standing there outside the door. They didn’t want to go. I really did not understand. “Mother, why can’t we have the food, they went to all that trouble and it’s right here.”
“We do not accept charity, that’s why.” For my mother, charity meant shame because it included pity. Pity, especially from the hillbillies, meant they placed themselves above her. Mom’s dignity was hard won through sharp-edged lessons and sacrifices as she clawed her way out of an orphanage and up from the bottom of the social strata. There would be no turkey today.
Back at school some children were not as affected by the president’s death as we were. One little boy in my class said, “I’m glad he’s dead. We hated him. We’re Republicans.” I had never heard that kind of hatred before. My teacher Mrs. Halworth interrupted:
“You will not speak about the president that way. Not in this classroom.”
Mrs. Halworth sat down at her desk and gave us a lesson on being American. “I am a Republican and I did not vote for President Kennedy, but he was our president and you will respect him . . . We are all Americans, and our president has been killed.”
Mrs. Halworth then read to us from Charlotte’s Web as we put our heads down on the desk for nap time. For forty minutes each afternoon, the spider, the pig, and I got ready to go to the fair. The teardrops that fell on my desk the day Charlotte died would have made a lovely pool for Charlotte’s children to swim in. Indeed, my desk was my little house away from home, where I ducked and covered, ready to be saved by my magic shelter in case of nuclear war. No book ever hurt as much as that children’s book hurt us all that day. It was like part of my own mother died.
There were also school fairs, the smell of tacos, and the cakewalks for the PTA. There were playgrounds of tetherball, four square, and kickball, plus the many songs that are only sung in childhood but are remembered by a few adults whose hearts keep a piece of the enchantment of their youth.
The Intruder
In the Arizona sky buzzards were always circling. Death was ever-present and always near. Someday we will circle over you too, called the buzzards, descending on the horizon.
The dust of my nightmares leaves a fuzzy coating on my daytime horizon. In the darkness of sleep, a faraway horror is always present and moving toward me. In morning, my waking molds the little clay figures of my nighttime terrors. Sometimes they come into new life in a song. Sometimes they spring back as a full recall of lost memories.
I had terrible night terrors as a child, and fear of the dark long into my adult life. This story is my long-repressed memory that only found me recently as I forced myself to recall my jumbled life in 1963. It was a childhood nightmare come to life.
I was sleeping when my mother woke me in the middle of the night. She was kneeling beside my bed shaking me to wake up. The wind rustled across the porch, and the light from the street was bright enough to almost see Mother’s face. I awoke to a strange terror, the kind that only comes when your parents are frightened.
“Wake up, Rickie Lee!” Her fingers grasped