The long, terrible weekend has finally come to an end. The commercials have returned to TV and radio and with them all the regular programming. You went back to school, ate your lunch, went outside at recess, did your lessons and came back home. And now, it’s back to life as usual. Except that it isn’t. The assassination of a U.S. president—especially in this day and age—isn’t a usual occurrence by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s why neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to forget it.

The news that President Kennedy had been shot came to you as suddenly and unexpectedly as the shots themselves. Without any warning, the principal’s secretary flipped on the P.A. system and began to relay the first breathless radio accounts to the entire school. You will be able to recite some of the exact words of the broadcast for the rest of your life. And you will always remember the sadness and disbelief in the announcer’s voice. “We have a bit of information…that Texas now says…that the President is dead…That is only an unconfirmed report. We have only an UN-confirmed report…Ladies and gentlemen; this is a moment…trying for all of us. Let us pause and let us all pray.”

When you are an old man in the distant future, you’ll hear some people (people who weren’t around in 1963) say that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us at all. “A President riding in an open limousine through a canyon of high-rise buildings and hundreds of open windows? How could you not see it coming?” But you didn’t see it coming, did you? No one did. Before last Friday, the most recent President to be murdered (and what does it say about us that there have been so many?) was William McKinley in 1901—before television, before radio, before the Titanic, before two world wars, before Sputnik, before even the first flight of the Wright brothers. It was a different time, and America was a different place. But by 1963 America had grown up. We had made the world safe for democracy…twice. We had come back from a crippling depression to become the economic engine that drives the world. We cured polio, and we put men into outer space. We had television and communication satellites. And we had convinced ourselves that horrors like political assassinations belonged to lesser countries and long-ago times. As far as you knew, the America of the 1960s was a sophisticated, respectful, compassionate and self-assured place…until last Friday, and I know you now feel more than a little adrift.

When you were even younger than you are now you fantasized about having an adventure. An adventure in a new and strange place…like the one Dorothy had when she found herself in the Land of Oz. Well, last Friday the cyclone came and, like in the movie, it was dark and terrifying and brutal. It lifted you from the America of your imagination and dropped you in a new and very strange place. It may not be the Land of Oz exactly, but you’re clearly “not in Kansas anymore.” Brace yourself, kiddo. In almost exactly a month you will become a teenager and you will begin a time of hormonal and emotional weirdness. It would have been weird even if last Friday’s horror hadn’t happened. But it did, so expect things to get weirder still.

In a lot of ways this ‘new and strange place’ will resemble the Land of Oz. Oh, there won’t be any wicked witches or flying monkeys, or anything like that, but things will get pretty scary from time to time. Like the Land of Oz, however, it will also be a place of music and magic and beauty and really, REALLY fascinating characters. And as it did for Dorothy, it will often seem as though a once black and white world had suddenly gone Technicolor! Still, unlike Dorothy, you will never be able to click your heels and return to the world you knew before November 22, 1963. But you will be able to hold the memories of that time in your heart and, many years from now, you will want to show the world what it was like before the cyclone came.

In the meantime it’s okay to be sad. Everyone is sad. Right now you and your country need some time for reflection and respectful sadness. But please know that some of the magic in this new world is right around the corner. I won’t tell you too much right now, but I know you’re gonna love it. In the meantime just think “Liverpool.” Don’t worry, when the time comes you’ll know what I was talking about.

Note to those of us who reside in the future. Here is a link to the ABC Radio broadcast played over the P.A. system at my school on 11/22/63: http://jfk-assassination-as-it-happened.blogspot.com/2012/08/abc-radio.html

 …and another to moment when the sadness was lifted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jenWdylTtzs