Memories

My recollections regarding Three Mile Island (last post)has had me thinking about landmark memories-those memories we all have of significant events that include where we were, what we were doing when the news got to us. There are some that are common, I think, to nearly everyone-at least Americans of similar age. If, like me, we are mid-fifties or older, the JFK assassination and September 11, 2001 are probably the most widely shared landmark memories. As a third-grader at the time, I was not old enough to have understood the impact of President Kennedy's murder, but I clearly remember the grave tone of our school Principal's voice, Mr. Noble, when he announced the president's death, and the teachers trying, unsuccessfully, to hide their own shock. We were sent home early, and I watched the news with my grandmother, whose explanations and her own reactions more clearly communicated to me just how big this event was than the news itself. I think my kids' understanding of 9/11/01, similarly, derived more from adults around them. Now 18 and 16, they were 11 and 9 at the time, so were, I'm sure, made aware of the seriousness of the events by the reactions of their teachers, the panicked parents picking up their kids, and the preempting of TV programming. Many folks would include on their landmark list, depending of course on age: the Challenger explosion of January 28, 1986. (Can that possibly be 23 years ago??? Impossible.); the murders of Robert Kennedy (June '68) and Martin Luther King (April "68). I am not old enough, obviously, to remember December 7th, 1941. But on a Boy Scout hike on the Appalachian Trail, on a much later December 7th, our scout master, Mr. Kessler, ask if any of us knew the significance of the date. We did not. He told us of hearing the news, as a young man on a Sunday afternoon that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. So, for me, Pearl Harbor Day is only a vicarious memory, but it always evokes the memory of stopping for lunch on that hike, and Mr. Kessler mesmerizing us with his landmark memory. These events are probably the 1st magnitude, in terms of clarity, and how commonly they are shared. The 2nd magnitude gets more varied by age, interests, and geography. The TMI story is near the top of my own list but surely less so for someone from Colorado, similarly, the Columbine shootings of April '99 were certainly more immediate and personal for nearby residents. The April '95 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, again, was certainly a gigantic news event everywhere, but to those directly affected in some way it is certainly a far more intense memory. Many York, Pa residents of sufficient age would likely include the riots of 1969 among their most clear and intense memories. Moving, again, down a rung in terms of commonality, the next layer of landmark memories, for me, includes the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970 and of Jim Morrison in '71. A ninth grader then, I woke up each school morning to a clock radio tuned to WSBA AM and those three stories, and I recall, the Sharon Tate murders were all shocking morning news stories. The killings of 4 students at Kent State by National Guardsman in May '70 is another landmark memory for me, one that represents the intensely divided sentiments of those days regarding Viet Nam. [in Don McLean's American Pie, which is really a musical collage of his landmark memories, that event is behind the lines "the players tried to take the field, the marching band refused to yield, do you recall what was revealed..." Do you? It was President Nixon's speech to the nation admitting the war had been expanded into Cambodia]. The shooting of President Reagan by John Hinkley Jr. in March of '81, and the murder of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman in December 1980, are both events I clearly recall learning of. Then, thirdly, are the landmark memories that are personal and individual-shared only by a small group of family or friends. They are, of course, our clearest, most intense, and most personally impacting events-deaths of people close to us, marriages, births, divorces, career highs and lows, relationships blossoming, or terminating. All memories, I guess, no matter how widely the events they are built around are commonly shared, are very individual and unique, written into our brains against a backdrop of our own unique experiences. jls