Trifecta

Los Angeles, California

I spent most of my elementary school years in Burbank, California. I attended Henry M. Mingay elementary school, in the Burbank School District. I belonged to Brownies and Girl Scout troop 157. One day when I was wearing my uniform with that number sewn onto my badge sash, I was told by my teacher that my IQ score had coincidentally come in with that very number. They're probably not supposed to tell a kid that, but I hardly knew what it meant. Today we say that age is just a number. So are scores.

And then we moved to Northridge, and I was reeling in the drama of starting a new school and knowing no one. I felt like a stranger in a strange land that first day. And I was desperately missing my friends. Unlike Mingay, this school had an public address system where they piped messages into the classrooms. And it was there, on my first day of school, that it was announced to us that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. At lunchtime, knowing no one, I went to the library which was located near the front of the campus. I saw that the flag had been lowered and understood that the president had been lost.

I had spent close to six months earlier that year living in a community in Maryland which was not far from Washington D.C. We often went to dinner in Washington. My parents liked the Watergate Inn. And one evening we went to see DiVinci's Mona Lisa displayed, which was on loan from the Louvre. My parents were Eisenhower Republicans, who had not voted for Kennedy but even they fell under the allure of the young president with the stylish wife. Everywhere we went we saw people meeting the challenge of the President's fitness program. Holding signs as they ran, walked and hiked. We went to New York and saw a musical, Mr. President, Irving Berlin's last Broadway musical, the book loosely based on the country's admiration for this new, modern administration. It all ended. Just like that.

I share this sense with others that many things in life come in threes. As I have written before, I have seen three no-hitters at Dodgers Stadium. I have been in three adult relationships. I lost the three people closest to me in the span of one year. And, there have been three mega events in my life: The Kennedy assassination; 9/11, and the Pandemic.

I was talking to Joel recently about this and about the changes that each of those things brought into our lives. I think the Kennedy assassination brought to us children a new reality that things like that could happen. We had been innocent, although we had already been through the Cuban Crisis and the duck and cover drills that came along with it. But somehow, even though sensing the adults' tension about this, the danger didn't really register with us kids. But the Kennedy assassination was the first indication that felt real. It came into our living rooms and told us that there was danger, and evil, in the country in which we lived. Other assassinations came afterwards, but didn't feel as shocking as that first one. Those were happening after Pandora's box had been opened. And by then, the war in Viet Nam was also in our living rooms, albeit only for a half an hour each evening on the nightly network news. We should have been grateful that we were spared the 24/7 news cycle that was to come.

9/11 brought inconceivable horror into our lives. We knew about terrorism. But we hadn't really considered that it could happen on our soil on such a large scale. It changed everything. I had been in New York that summer and, enroute to Bermuda, had sailed out past lower Manhattan and the World Trade towers, one of which I had ridden to the top of just three years earlier. The July 2001 sailing was a magical trip. My favorite of all the mother-daughters cruises my mom had generously taken both my sister and me on, each summer for over a score of years.

In late October, 2001 Tom and I flew to Kona on United Airlines. We had upgraded to first class, but the flight attendants didn't serve us cocktails before taking off as they had in the past. I thought they looked uneasy. Maybe I was projecting, but then, why wouldn't they look uneasy? We were eyeing the other passengers on the half-filled plane. When we got to the Kona Village, meeting Sandra and John there, we found it even more empty than normal. Late October was never a busy time at the Village, but that may have been the trip when there were 60 guests at the Village which has a capacity of about 300.

Now, at airports, we were wending through long lines in security and would soon be taking off our shoes before boarding flights. Terrorism continued but became domestic terrorism. School and church shootings, government buildings bombed, and then the conspiracy groups, mostly uneducated men and bimbo women riding in on the coattails of the least-qualified, most amoral and unethical character to ever become president.

And then we got novel coronavirus Covid19. And in that almost-60 year span, I think this is the one that carries the most weight, as it impacts every single aspect of our lives. There is no place to be safe with others. None. It's like a sexually-transmitted disease where you are sleeping with everyone the person you are sleeping with has slept with. Only it is a breathing-transmitted disease. Where do we not breathe when we are with others? No options, other than to not be with others which is an even deadlier choice. Or meet the risk, as we need to, to live our lives. But how to heed while living our lives? Maps of yore used to indicate where you fell off the edge of the flat earth. This way there be dragons. In so many ways, we now live with these dragons (as well as with our own personal elephants in the room!).

The day of the Kennedy assassination, my mother came to school to pick me up and my grandfather was in the car with her. He told me that he remembered the McKinley assassination. My grandfather lived to see both the Wright brothers first flight as well as the moon landing. He survived injuries from a cyclone as well as the loss of my grandmother after almost sixty years of marriage.  Maybe, if I'm lucky, resiliency runs in my genes, and it will provide the ability to surf the waves of yet another historical upheaval. But after the past two and-a-half years of Covid, and the trifecta of disaster in my lifetime, it is a challenge for me not to ponder with trepidation: What's next?