Forty-Seven Years Ago

Some people on the LMB list are reminiscing about their memories of the day JFK was assassinated. I have no memory of that; I was a month or two shy of my fifth birthday. I do remember, however, being taught (in school) a song that was basically his "Ask not..." set to music, and it must have been around then. It occurs to me to wonder if that might not have been after, or even in response to, the assassination.

Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis also died that same day.

Lady NotFromHere

Huh. Mary Chapin Carpenter, despite having penned "I Am a Town", a beautiful lyric about the rural South, was born in Princeton, and (as far as I can tell) has never lived south of DC.

Two Plus Two...

Or rather, 10+1958.

There is a passage in Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Stones in the Road" that I have loved since I first heard it:

When I was ten my father held me
On his shoulders above the crowd
To see a train all draped in mourning
Passing slowly through our town

The widow knelt with all her children
At the sacred burial ground
The TV glowed, that long hot summer,
With all the cities burning down

I have always assumed that it was about the death of John Kennedy; 1964 was a year of nationwide rioting. Today, though, looking up Carpenter's Wikipedia article, I noticed that she was born in 1958.

It did not occur to me, until I was prompted by someone on the LMB list, that 10+1958 is 1968, not 1963; the lines above are about Bobby Kennedy and the (equally riot-torn) summer of 1968.

:shakes head at self: