NOVEMBER 22, 2019 – I remember the fall day decades ago. It was just before noon as I walked from my office building—the First National Bank Building in downtown St. Paul—to the St. Paul Athletic Club, where I launched my daily (running) workout. Next to the club was a parking lot, and standing there were members of the University of Minnesota Gopher Football band playing their hearts out in a downtown pepfest for the next day’s home game.
I was all of 31 at the time and mused that the oldest “kid” in the band was a full decade younger. How young they looked! I thought to myself. Imagine—the oldest kid there wasn’t even born when President Kennedy was shot!
That was in 1985—23 years after the assassination. Another 34 years have passed since that Gopher pepfest! That means, the oldest people to have been born after that tragic day in Dallas would be 56—the age of many parents of today’s Gopher Football band members.
Every single one of us who was alive and old enough in 1963 to remember much of anything remembers exactly what we were doing and where . . . the moment they heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination on Friday, November 22. Me? I was in Miss Gorham’s fourth grade class. Miss Murphy, one of the kindergarten teachers, was the messenger. She opened the door to our classroom, and with a voice and countenance as stern as any she’d ever used on her charges, she announced the awful news: “The president has been SHOT!”
Jackie Rudrud, sitting directly across from me in the next aisle, started sobbing. It wasn’t long before the voice of the principal, Mr. Keufler came over the loudspeaker telling us that school would be let out early.
For the next number of days, the country wept in mourning. Everyday life ground to a halt.
What would the world be like if Oswald had missed? We can’t know. We can reap only what has been sown.
Yesterday I spent hours in the cold, damp, snowy November weather, tending my trees—young white pine, planted where giant pine, centuries old once stood before the forest was clear-cut. May my trees survive wind and weevils, browsing deer and blister rust. But even if my little trees live to be 100 or 200 years old, they will one day succumb to the forces of time and nature. Tall and of mighty girth, they will die—suddenly or slowly—and their trunks will fall to the ground. Decay will set in, and in time, the trees will be forgotten, however much their atoms have been incorporated into the life-giving soil that nourishes successive generations of trees and other forest flora.
As in the case of “kids” born after President Kennedy died, my trees will grow, oblivious to the forest stalwarts that preceded them. What would the forest be had it not been savaged? We can’t know. We can reap only what we have sown.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
