If only there were anesthetic for memory. It would be so easy to careen through existence as though there were no consequences for a life lived and pain suffered, as though the bad could be forgotten and the good wrapped like restaurant take-out to enjoy later. Alas, that is not how life works. As we stand rooted to this little planet of ours the years spiral around and age us, the seasons carve off pieces of what we thought we were and the sun and moon rise and set on us laughingly, knowing we will diffuse and blow away eons before they will. Our greatest gift, our life, is our greatest curse, because it will be taken away and consigned to a handful of memories and those who harbor the memories will themselves diffuse and blow away. We are important while we are here, but only important to ourselves, and to a handful of those who agree to love us, but in the end, eventually, the ink of our legacy fades.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a flawed and brilliant man, left the creation four decades ago, shattered by the bullets of an assassin or assassins. We will never know whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. We will forever know how we were left alone, how a dark red cloud obscured the dawn of what some called "Camelot," how the drums of the caisson’s entourage embedded its relentless cadence in our memories. Boom, they said, boom-boom-boom. Over and over again, like lonely boots on an empty deck, boom, boom-boom-boom. I hear them yet. I still see the empty stirrups, the quiet crowds along the boulevard, I remember a network announcer reciting "Oh Captain, My Captain," I remember the lines of mourners who waited for hours to touch the flag that draped the coffin, I remember Jacquelyn reaching under that flag, I remember little "John-John" saluting the solemn procession. Boom, boom-boom-boom.

I was only a freshman in high school and largely unschooled in cynicism. My first political experience came in the campaign of 1960, when I passed out literature and door-hangers for John F. Kennedy, Stewart Udall, Wade Church, and Lee Ackerman, among others. I had dogs sicced on me and rocks thrown at me, I was told that my support of Kennedy meant that I supported the Papacy taking over America, but, more important, I had a Dad who understood the spiritual core of his politics and how to pass it on to his only child. The rocks, epithets, and dogs had no effect on me. I knew I was stronger than they were.

I huddled with my parents during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. I knew that the crisis threatened the planet, I realized anew the importance of, and futility of, the "hunker under your desks" drills in the siren-screaming Sixties, and I believed that JFK would stand firm and prevail. Bless his sinful and plagued soul, he did. Life was affirmed. Belief was affirmed. Those things he stood for, equality under the law, civil rights, democracy, human rights, the space program, seemed affirmed in the wake of the crisis of October, 1962.

All it took to bludgeon the affirmation was one bullet on November 22, 1963.

I was playing, ironically, touch football with a friend that afternoon. My friend Mark Zajicek’s parents owned Mickey’s Diner on East Speedway and lived in a home on a large lot right behind it. As Mark and I playfully tossed the football around and laughed and talked teenage trash, his mother ran to us and said, "Mark, have you heard the news? The President has been shot!" I laughed, the reaction of a high school freshman to news that could not possibly be true. What a ludicrous joke, I thought, not even considering that Mark’s mother could never stoop to such bad taste. Then I saw the tears in her eyes and my mind went blank.

Mark and I silently followed her into the house, where both a radio and television were on. I watched as Frank McGee, a telephone receiver to his ear, repeated the dispatch from an NBC correspondent in Dallas: "President Kennedy is…" McGee couldn’t finish. His jaw trembled. He looked at the camera, as shocked as we were. "…dead." A component of my soul tore from me, diffused and blew away.

An hour later, my grandparents picked me up at Mark’s place. My Grandfather, Albert Tully, a mountainous rock of a man, was crying. While I was waiting for my grandparents to pick me up, I told a couple of businessmen in suits that the President had been killed. They dismissed me like a fly. They didn’t believe me. The President shot? Go away, kid. They reacted to the news as I did at Mark’s place. It was just a bad-taste joke, they thought. I’ll bet they still remember the conversation we had on the sidewalk in front of "Mickey’s."

A song from my youth contained the lyrics, "Yesterday’s rain falls again and again." So do yesterday’s tears. When I was fourteen, all the candles of my life still burned. I had not yet said goodbye to grandparents and parents, to friends and lovers whose lives were cut short. For many of us, the Kennedy assassination introduced mortality. That is why so many of us know exactly where we were, exactly what we were doing, and exactly how we felt when the President was struck down. There was suddenly a canyon in our personal histories and our innocence was left on the other side.

I have grown and grayed over the last four decades. John Kennedy was followed by his brother Robert, by Albert and Sarah and Joe and Margaret Tully, by my best friend Layne Jordan, killed by cancer in 1994, by other friends lost to disease, war and suicide. All those losses collapse into each other on November 22. I suspect that is why so many of my contemporaries shed tears on this day and wonder why the feeling doesn’t go away. We feel what we miss so very, very much and on November 22 we feel it all at once.

There is something else. I also miss the skinny, innocent, unknowing high school freshman with his shirttail out and a football in his hand on the morning of November 22, 1963. I think that my contemporaries and I have a similar vision every November 22: that of an innocent child on a receding shore, silently waving goodbye.