Defining Moments

For my mother, it was Pearl Harbor. For my students, it’s 9/11. For my generation, of course, it was the Kennedy assassination. All of us can answer that question: What were you doing when JFK was shot? Walking to seventh-grade Home Ec, in my case – I remember hushed whispers in the hallway, an awareness of something wrong. And then an announcement over the intercom. It was the day we were supposed to cook a full breakfast in class. We cooked in stunned silence.

My family spent the whole weekend watching television. We’d only had the TV for a few months; my parents wanted us all to be good readers before they let it into the house. We watched the weekend unfold in black and white: the crowds lining the street, the coffin with its ominous music, the two small children holding the widow’s hand.

Fifty years later, friends remember that day, sharing words such as “loss of innocence.” Until then, growing up in the fifties, it had been possible to believe that nothing bad would happen. I realize now that World War II had ended only eighteen years before. But that was ancient history, before I was even born. My father had spent four years as a medic in the South Pacific, but he never talked about it – the memories were too terrible. I did not grow up under the shadow of recent war. We lived in modern times, when things like that couldn’t happen. But then Kennedy was shot, and we learned that they could.

When I first started teaching, I used to ask my students which moments defined their generation. The Challenger disaster? some suggested. The OJ trial? But then 9/11 came along, and I didn’t have to ask.

It won’t be long before my newest students don’t remember that day. Already, many were only small children when the Twin Towers fell. Their memories are of more recent disasters.

As children, we see the past as something finished, an unreal time before we were born, a time when bad things used to happen. And then some new disaster comes along – Pearl Harbor, Kennedy, the Twin Towers – and we discover those bad things can still happen after all.