Page 568 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Still Serious
I can’t depart from our years in 16 Church Lane South without at least touching on one other extremely serious day that occurred while we resided there.
There are those events in one’s life that, even though not personal, nevertheless sear themselves into one’s consciousness and stun, disori- ent, and transform: My father could take you through virtually every moment of December 7, 1941, the day upon which the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor and thereby brought the country into World War II; my mother could vividly recount her reaction and that of those around her when, on April 12, 1945, she was holding her baby in her arms as she received the news that President Roosevelt, who was a god to her and most of the nation, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia; and I’ve already addressed November 22, 1963, when we lost John Kennedy to an assassin’s bullet in Dallas. Close in horror and significance were April 6, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis (an event that I learned of from televi- sion in Berkeley, California, where I had just watched Senator Eugene McCarthy, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, address a large crowd of students, only six days after President Lyndon Johnson, besieged by his own party because of his handling of the Viet- nam War, had announced in a televised speech that he would not seek, nor accept, the nomination of his party for another term); June 5, 1968, when Sirhan Sirhan shot Senator Robert Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, an event that occurred minutes after the senator had made a victory speech (which I watched in the early-morning hours), in which he referred to Don Drysdale’s achievement of 582/3 scoreless innings, and finished by saying, “Now, it’s on to Chicago. . . .” Close, but not surprising, was the evening of Decem- ber 12, 2000, during which I watched TV reporters furiously thumb through, and try to comprehend, the reasoning and the result of the 5–4 decision of the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, which in effect elected
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