Life Nouns -: On A Clear Day

I fumbled through the last rack of sales clothes, deciding to keep what was left of my five dollar weekly allowance as Patricia shouted, “Time to get back to campus. It’s nearly one, and chapel starts at two.” We three girls hopped into Carla’s 1960 white Impala and drove back to Texas Wesleyan College.

Carla parked the car behind the dorm, and as we reached the covered walk between the dorm and the cafeteria we were met by five or six of our dorm mates, all flustered and crying, running up to us and shouting. Suddenly it hit me what they were saying, “He’s dead. He’s been shot!. The president is dead!”

“He is not!” I said, laughing. “You’re teasing. Why, I just got back from seeing him in downtown Ft. Worth.”

In truth, it had been at least three hours since I saw President Kennedy,

John F. Kennedy (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

but time shrank for me at that instant. Tears welled in my eyes as the truth sank in. All I could see was myself standing in a thinning line of people at the end of the motorcade route leaving Ft. Worth that morning for the President’s flight to Dallas. My classmates and I stood on the blacktop street in the front row, the morning sun filtering through evergreen live oaks, yellow leaved pin oaks, brown leaved red oaks and the bare branches of stately pecans and red buds. Birds flitted, and some lit atop telephone wires criss-crossing the street. People behind me laughed, cheered and waved. No barricades separated the crowd from the motorcade. Suddenly, the black Cadillac convertible slowed directly in front of me for a few seconds. In the back seat sat The President and Mrs. Kennedy. His smiling, blazing blue eyes lit up a tanned, leathery face, his hand raised in a wave, a shock of caramel blonde hair caught in the slight breeze. Mrs. Kennedy wore a light cranberry wool suit that had a darker trim, a matching pill box hat adorning flowing brunette hair, her hand up in a demure wave, deep brown eyes accompanying a slighter smile. I could have reached out and touched them. How alive they were, how vibrant! They filled the air around us with the electricity of a charisma that reached across the void between us and touched me as if I had actually walked over and shook the President’s hand. Enchantment filled my heart. I thought I might as well be dating Elvis as to be this close to the first couple!

As I snapped back into the moment at hand, I joined the huddle of college girls who wailed and moaned, and I thought through my own tears, “What will we do without him?”

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