Sixty Years Have Flown By

 

by Pa Rock

Time Traveler

Time really does go by faster as we age.  I don't understand the physics of it, but I am living the phenomenon and know it to be true.

John Kennedy, a President of the United States whom a few of us can still  remember, was killed sixty years ago today, and yet it wasn't sixty years ago but rather just weeks ago, or perhaps days even.  Time has rushed by at an alarming speed, and in mere moments we, too, will be gone, lying peacefully in a darkened box beneath a cold tombstone without even the flickering of an eternal flame for light and warmth.

Back in the day in my little hometown, the place I wrote about yesterday, the school lunch period was an actual hour in length, and any student who lived close to the school could walk home for lunch.  Some, those with money in their pockets, could even walk down onto Main Street and order a hamburger or hotdog fresh off of the grill at one of the local drug stores.  (That was a full decade before Walmart began decimating America's Main Streets and turning once proud family businesses into flea markets.)

I was a sophomore and had just finished a school lunch (which was 25 cents) and been out exploring with some of my friends when the bell rang to summon us back to class on that November Friday sixty years ago.  My after lunch "class" was a study hall in the biggest classroom in the little school, a room which also contained our small school library.  I was sitting in there doing some homework - or, more likely reading an encyclopedia (remember those?), when an older friend walked in and announced that while he had been home having lunch, there was an announcement on television that President Kennedy had been shot.  We had no school intercom for news updates, but a few teachers circulated through the building for the remainder of the afternoon relating what they had heard on the radio in the office.  Late in the day there was an all-school assembly where the superintendent got up and announced that the President was dead and that the country now had a new President.

It was shocking, and sad, and a day that most people could never forget.  John Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, sixty years ago today, but it feels like yesterday.  Where the heck has all of that time gone?