Yes I Know The Day - JFK

I was standing in line (fifth grade?) It was a long line I was at the end of because I was always late--was it lunch? Morning? I think it was recess before lunch because I seem to remember fiddling with my Magic Pocket, the hole in my red bomber style nylon jacket that went all the way into the back so that I would routinely pull out all numbers of absurd items from my pocket for the lunch ticket counter to take and hold while I piled up more, (the poor kids had lunch tickets) I think I was fishing around to line-up the choicest weird things to place when the news shot through like on a conga line, or a wave had I known what that was -- more like a conga line with all the knees buckling and hands to the face. "The President's been shot!" All the teachers letting the line go out of order, crying, even the dreaded lunch-ticket lady. The line stopped moving. Someone said something about a tv in the teacher's room. No one knew what to do. No one in charge but our own individual consciousness -- not the usual, the national con-science, as I think I began spelling it then.

Wicked white lunch ladies. Lines. Where's a good brussell sprout when you need one?

We went home. Our parents were going to need us. My mom saw it all on tv. Grandma, probably outside. My brother, too, from another school, I think, that's how I knew it was 5th grade. Everyone better at arithmetic (a word my computer no longer knows) than me, and me loving snakes and hiding my skinny snakey arms in a too-big jacket. I was beside myself with grammar and the power of a dictionary when in mortal combat with a real unseen enemy. I had ended trying to bite my constituents on the playground like a beaver. I was no longer my brother's slave, he'd gone on to guitars and freedom's train. I was watching the motorcade on tv in rerun, in rerun, in rerun, and it married in my mind with black horses. This is what I think of when I think of this day, a first thought: black horses.

I don't drive today because when I think of cars I think of black oil & when I think of black oil I think of motorcades & then I think of JFK & then I think: black horses -- someday soon, we will all be back to horses.