There’s been lots of events in life, but they never arrived one at a time in neat order. Television arrived as furniture that hummed and needed coaxing, and in that same glow I watched the Beatles try to be heard over the screaming, and years later I watched a news bulletin crawl across the bottom of that screen while a sick child was asleep on the couch next to me. V
Fear has a particular quiet. I heard it during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the adults turned the radio down to talk, I heard it again as a young man when Vietnam had us watching draft numbers on the news, and I heard it again much later when Covid emptied the streets. By then the house was quiet, the kids were grown and calling to check in, and we were all back in front of the television together, waiting.
Grief interrupted everything. The murder of two Kennedys and a King came between homework and work shifts and did not wait for us to be ready, and at the same time the Beatles were on that same radio trying to give us something else to carry. Careers were starting in that noise, and kids came a little later, bringing chicken pox and school plays that mattered more on a Tuesday than any headline.
The long middle was all mixed together. Careers, kids, measles and mumps, television that went from rabbit ears to color to something you carry in your pocket. I would hear a song in the grocery store and travel back through those decades, one with a draft notice and one with a diaper bag.
As the days go by, the list just keeps growing, from the advent of television to Covid, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to chicken pox, from the murder of two Kennedys and a King to careers and kids. I don’t try to separate the good memories from the bad ones anymore. They sit side by side, as they were lived. That jumble is not clutter. It is proof that we were all here, and, as far as we know, there’s still time to add a few more good ones.
