President Kennedy
They say that everybody who is older than 55 or so remembers exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot, the same way everybody from our parents’ generation remembers where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor, and everybody today who’s older than 16 or 17 remembers where they were when the airplanes hit the twin towers. I suppose it’s mostly true, but when you’re dealing with human beings, nothing is ever 100%.
Anyway, a few years back, I don’t know where to find the details but I’m sure this happened, somebody got the bright idea to check it out. They interviewed a whole bunch of people about where they’d been and then they went out and interviewed the people they said they’d been with, and very often the stories didn’t match up.
It’s hard to know if people deliberately fabricated their stories, because being a thing that everybody talks about, people want a cooler story than “Well, I was sitting at home by myself watching TV and scratching my balls…” and certainly there are the extreme cases where people don’t want to say anything that will implicate them in something illegal or embarrassing.
More likely there were a lot of cases of people not remembering so clearly, but filling in the blanks as time goes by, to the point where they believe it themselves. We know so little about history and half of it is lies.
That said, I will tell you my story. I was 9 and in 4th grade at Longfellow Elementary School, built in the fine brick and glass tradition of the 60s, and my teacher was Mrs. DeLong, who’d been Miss Kniebel when we were in 3rd grade, and that was a totally incomprehensible thing to me, because she was so old. (She probably wasn’t really, but that was my impression at the time) Anyway, we’d been out at recess, quite likely I’d been on the monkey bars because that was my favorite, and when we came back in from that we had to line up for the bathroom.
Over in the girls’ line, a girl named Dawn, who I kind of had a crush on, was spreading the word, because she lived right across the street from the school and went home during recess.
We all immediately ganged up on her, and the group consensus was “Nyuh uh, you’re lying!” which was really quite illogical of us, because why would she lie about something so easily verifiable.
Nonetheless, between the bathroom and the classroom, it was already out of my mind, and there was our teacher, standing at the front of the classroom and quietly weeping.
Shortly afterward, they sent us home, and I was thinking “Hey, cool, we got a half day off” and I was wondering how I’d explain that to my Mom, and then I walked through the front door and she was standing at the ironing board, staring at the TV, and crying. That’s the moment I really remember. That’s when I knew it was real.
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