Dallas

The 22nd, and it becomes inescapable: the Kennedy assassination, 50 years ago. A before and after, where-were-you event.

I was a very young boy. In fact, the assassination may be my earliest conscious memory. There’s a fine way to start off a life: televised murder and national grieving before you know what death is. And people wonder why my work has a dark sensibility.

Here’s how the political becomes personal. At the time, my dad worked for the Spokane Chronicle. The news came over the TV or radio in the cafe where he ate his lunch, and, when the shock subsided, my father turned to the waitress and, in his droll way, asked: “Can I get that to go?”

I didn’t see him for the next three days. The newspaper staff basically lived at the office, publishing nonstop updates. I still recall the anxiety and confusion I felt. Adults—men and women—spontaneously, inexplicably weeping for reasons I couldn’t understand. This great man, dead. And, to my mind, my father missing.

I do have one weird, vivid memory from that time. Waking up early, while the rest of the household slept, and wandering out to the living room. Turning on the TV. Black and white, hearses moving slowly past blurred faces lining the street. And, for some reason, I put my hands flat against the screen, as though I might receive some kind of physical transmission. I don’t remember ever having done that, before or since. The screen seemed to sizzle.

It all gets muddled, of course. Did I see Cronkite announce the president’s death? It seems like I did, but I’ve seen the clip so many times since then, Cronkite removing his glasses and choking up, that I can’t separate the real-time event from subsequent footage.

It was frightening, of course, even though I surely couldn’t understand what was going on. I remember fear. And I remember trying not to show it because everyone was already upset. The event t became a touchstone for years of “oh no” moments. Bobby. MLK. Chicago. “This is a CBS/NBC/ABC news bulletin….”

Years later, I’d have my own chance, as a radio reporter, to become The Voice. I’m sure I announced a few deaths, but the only even I really remember was announcing we’d invaded Grenada. Grenada? Where? Isn’t that a soft drink? I suppose it had its weight, so close to Cuba. I ripped the story off the teletype, just like in the movies. I can’t tell you how somber…and marvelous…that felt. That sort of thing makes you a news junkie.

The killing marked another cultural change, one that took a while to settle in. Those various shoot-em-up films from the Fifties? Where a character gets shot, clutches, and slides to the floor, perhaps a thin, discreet trickle of blood showing? No more. Not after the president’s head explodes. “The pink mist” as the soldiers say. Coupled with the nightly televised carnage of the Vietnam War, a visceral reaction against the true horror of violence led to its hyperrealistic portrayal on film. “Bonnie and Clyde” probably set the tipping point, but a whole generation of filmmakers expressed their fury with fountains of blood, as if to scream: look at it, look at it, look at it!

Understandable, but now moviegoers watch gory torture flicks for entertainment, and mutilated bodies show up on network television, and every other week, it seems, someone with a gun flips into overload and goes full medieval on total strangers. So I’m not certain the aesthetic choice achieved the desired effect.

When the light faded from JFK’s eyes, it’s said a certain innocence went with it—an optimism and, as he would say, vigor. But it could also be said that a veil ripped away, and we saw a truer portrait America: violent, dark, paranoid, and vengeful.

The two, paradoxically, co-exist. And perhaps it’s ironic that a man who’d known his own share of loss and violence, war and illness, would unwittingly pass on a profound lesson. JFK turned out to be one World War II veteran who told his whole story.

First Dog

I read a moving piece in yesterday's New York Times, in which a woman recounts visiting her grandmother, who, unbeknownst to her, lived not far away. It's a fine stretch of writing (which you can read here), but the descriptions of the visit, the home, the atmosphere, brought back not some long-lost relative (though, if you're out there, Frederick Lane Patterson III, I do wonder whatever it was you disappeared into), but, rather, the acquisition of my first dog.

Which became somewhat legendary in my household, told and retold for some reason, and, now that my folks have passed on, I'm free to relate it however it returns from the past. Maybe the article's description of the grandmother's home or the reserve between, more or less strangers, prompted the memory. Probably the latter, since I seem to recall not a visit to a small house, but a visit to an apartment building.

In fact, if you've ever seen "Blue Velvet," I recall a visit to that apartment building. At least from the outside...one of those 40s or 50s brick, four-story blocks of mystery, with long hallways and numbered doors reminiscent of an old hotel. Again, this is all memory, coming from someone without particularly potent recall, who can barely remember things that happened last week, much less decades ago.

But it was, to a kid--a creepy joint, all right? Visiting at night, the street and public areas dark, and the apartment itself in deep, brown colors, with many small, framed pictures, and a black-and-white TV running: the stuff of Super 8 home movies. I was kind of a sickly kid, in a sickly family, and though we had parakeets and aquarium fish, my folks held off on a dog due to my possible allergies to fur. I don't recall what prompted the change. I remember being a little scared of dogs at the time--a few years earlier, two barking, snarling dogs had chased me and my best friend up a tree--and not being all that thrilled with the idea. Maybe my folks wanted me to get over that fear before it set too deeply. Somehow, one of parents latched on to Shetland Sheepdogs (my mother, I suspect), and we followed a newspaper ad to a family that had puppies to sell.

Which is where we veer into family legend because, per my parent's memory--I have only vague recall of this part--we set forth to find a puppy, but, when I sat down (in a padded brown rocker--I do remember that for some reason), the puppies' mother, Tessie, leapt into my lap. And wouldn't get down. Details become scrambled here, but the story ends with our taking Tessie, not the puppies, home with us. And a wonderful, gentle, perfect first dog she was, who trailed me around the house, and lay beside me on the floor as I drew or read comics or, perhaps, even as I began to add text to my notebooks full of drawings...which led to this writing thing I do.

Along the way, my family took on other shelties, achieving a four-dog peak during the 80s. Tessie, memorably, died on the day Richard Nixon resigned. My parents were relieved that Nixon exited, but a sense of personal sadness still colors references to that day. I remembered it rained, but that's not much of a reference point in the Pacific Northwest. It rained hard.

Still, looking back on the sellers (who seemed a little creepy to this kid), it makes me wonder what kind of people would sell the the mother of their pups. I mean, who sells a good dog? Was it some graceful acknowledgement that the dog found me and shifted loyalties? Did they need the money? Was that all it was about? Someone who set off to become breeder and found it didn't suit them? Were they terrible people, whom Tessie escaped from? Or were they moving and couldn't take the dogs? And what happened to the pups, who suddenly no longer had a mother? Of course, I don't remember names, and, as I recall them as being older, the sellers probably are long gone. Perhaps they'd just become too old to care for a dog. I don't remember much emotion on their part, but people often cloak these things.

Haunting. It all seems haunting. All I can really be sure of is, in one evening, I became a dog person. A very fortunate one. Maybe the dog sensed I needed her more than her puppies did.