46 Years

For baby boomers, the assassination of President Kennedy was the "defining moment" -  the moment that would be frozen in our minds forever.  Every person my age can state where they were, what they were doing.

It is so hard to believe, that in our age of cell phone cameras and Twitter, that there is only one movie film...one that has been analyzed over and over again.

This is such a defining event that even international sites , such as this one, run by a 38 year old German man, on the Internet that no one could have dreamed about on that day.

So, what was my story? I should have been in school.  But I had broken my leg a month before, and I was being home educated thanks to a tutor sent to my home a couple of times a week by the New York City Board of Education.  But not that day.  I was home, alone.  My mother (my stay at home Mom) had gone out shopping, and I did whatever I was doing (probably reading a book, knowing me.) I wasn't watching TV.

She came home.  She was crying.  I think it was a little after 1pm Eastern Time.

She turned on the TV set and that's when I found out.  It was unbelievable.  We were in shock.

When my friends came home from school, I met them by the elevator in my apartment building, and we talked for a long time.  No, we didn't email, we didn't IM, we didn't call each other on our cell phones.  We talked, we shared, the type of communication we had in those prehistoric days.   I don't remember exactly what we said.

Meanwhile on TV...We did have TV, black and white of course.  We listened to CBS or NBC or ABC...no CNN back then, no Fox News, no MSNBC.  The networks had non stop coverage.  All programming was canceled, something that wouldn't happen again until September 11, 2001.

There was one more thing.  My pet canary had died the day before.  Mom took me down to the pet store the next day to pick out a new canary.  We found a beautiful yellow bird with a blackish spot on its head.  "He's mourning President Kennedy", I said.

We bought the bird.