November 22, 2013. JFK.

I was 17 when JFK was murdered. At first I didn't believe the news, since I imagined that such a thing would not be possible. But the agitation of my fellow high-schoolers and our teachers soon convinced me. For the past week or so, there have been many programs on radio and television about JFK's life and death, about his killer, and about the physics of the event itself. All this has brought the period back to me. At the time, I was impressed by the drama of the succession, the grandeur of great events in high places. The human dimension of it, its meaning for his family and others, reached me only later. Ever since, I've had a strong sense of the unpredictability of life, of what the old Prayer Book calls "the changes and chances of this fleeting world."