I Also Remember

Over the last few days many have posted their memories of when they heard that President Kennedy had been killed. I was a junior at Alabama College in Montevallo, Alabama. One of my courses in Vocational Home Economics involved refinishing furniture. I had just applied warm oil to the beautiful walnut chair frame when someone came into the lab with the news. It seemed as if the world stopped and everything moved in a blur. Yet I continued to rub each section of the chair with a soft wool cloth until the oil was absorbed, finding the simple repetitive act of buffing the smooth wood somehow soothing. Fifty years later I remember that hollow feeling, and sometimes when I sit in that chair I find myself stroking the smooth wood.

As powerful as that memory remains, it was the news of the death of Robert Kennedy that has the most connection for me. My grandmother was visiting, and the two of us were watching television together when the news broke. She gasped and said, "Oh, poor Ethel, with all those children." To understand fully, you need to know that my mother, the eldest of five children, was only eight years old when her father was killed. When a former employee of her father came to the door, she and her brothers clustered around grandmother and heard her tell the visitor when my grandfather would return from an appointment. The man left, but walked only a short distance from the house, where he waited out of sight until my grandfather returned. He shot him at close range. My grandmother never mentioned how difficult it must have been for her, not only lose the love of her life, but to rear five children in a depression era world. In her softly spoken "Oh, poor Ethel with all those children" she revealed perhaps more than she realized. Her expressed empathy came from an understanding that most of us will never understand. When I think of the Kennedys, I remember, and am grateful for, the resilience of my remarkable grandmother.