My Mom told me that I was on her lap, crying (for one or more of the multitude of reasons that ten-month-old babies/tots cry). Perhaps I cried harder because I didn’t understand why my mother was crying. I had probably never seen her cry before. But she was only 24-years-old, she was young, full of hope, idealistic, Catholic and American, raised in an Italian immigrant family in New York City. Of course she had aspirations that had been kindled by the mythic stature of John F. Kennedy, a young and (apparently) vigorous President who summoned the post-war generation to “a New Frontier” and entered the space of everyone’s living room through the modern miracle of television. It was a long, long time ago.
Shocked, horrified, distraught, and sorrowful, my mother cried, and as a still-crawling baby I must have been disturbed myself, seeing her cry so much… as she sat with me on her lap, watching the TV…