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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 223By a young man in the Texas Theater.Tonight the networks say nothing so well as it is true.And outside, where there is no moon,the dessicated leaves rattle across November.It was gray and wet,unseasonably warm today.But in the unloved wind tonight,unnumbing, beginning to believe,I taste the coming bleakof the world%u2019s most lonely winter.My heart broke that day the earth stood still. The world quaked, fell to its knees, stopped, not knowing what to do, where to go, feeling time itself divide into before that day and after that day. Oh Jack! December 5, 1963Days of mourning later, after the Widow, after the tiny daughter, after the young son saluting, after the saddled black stallion, riderless, with the boots turned backwards in the stirrups, after the days of drums, Lock kind of slapped me around. He said my sentiments were hopeless, God rest ye, so hopeless they weren%u2019t even Christian.It was again the Eve of the Feast of Saint Nicholas, merry gentlemen, and while Ruprecht ran wild through the study halls exciting all the boys, let nothing you dismay, with thoughts of Christmas vacation, I told Lock, my best friend, nothing of my decision to abandon my vocation. He would have judged cause and effect in what was only sad coincidence.John Kennedy was dead and I was done a-grailing.I had saved enough money in my shoe box for a one-way train trip home to Peoria. Later, in the dead of the night, at 4:30, before dawn, fourteen days after the martyrdom of Jack Kennedy, the martyrdom of my vocation, I left Misericordia Seminary.I walked quietly down four flights of terrazzo stairs, alone, and with one suitcase, into which I packed eleven years of my life, I pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped out into the snow still lit by moonlight. Misericordia stood dark and separate behind me.I was a twenty-four-year-old boy, and I had never ever in eleven years of keeping the Grand Silence from dusk till dawn been outside the seminary buildings after night prayer.