Eighteen Years

(Wikimedia Commons)

It has become a banality: everyone alive at the time remembers exactly JFK’s assassination and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Banal as it is, I remember both, eidetically. I was in a classroom on November 22, 1963 when the teacher, a Sister of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was called out of the classroom, rushed back in, and in a numb voice proclaimed “President Kennedy was just shot.” We children sat…