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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (July 29, 1999)
Man vs. nature Kennedy tragedy helps shed light on meaning of life, death SAM McKEWON is the . editor of the Daily Nebraskan Summer Edition. , DALLAS, Texas — From room 2523 of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, you could see everything. You close your eyes and imagine die motor cade, as it went on to Elm. It laid out in my mind, perfectly (my thanks to Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” for making it seem so logisti cally simple when you sbe it in real life). And then, when you get down there, you find a small metal X in the middle of the road, marking the exact location where John Fitzgerald Kennedy was first hit with a sniper’s bullet on Nov. 22,1963. Twenty thousand cars pass over this X every day, I’m told by a hot dog vendor, who looks like he’s been there long enough to know and bored enough to count. Directly across from the X is the JFK memorial plaque. It’s small, about the size of place mat, and has a cross on it. The plaque is adorned with flowers, not of this man’s pass ing, but that of his son, JFK Jr. John John. The son who, if we believe what the newscasts told us, was loved by a nation as if he were every one’s son. (Apparently, my parents missed out on the coast-to-coast meeting that decided this proclama tion years ago.) The flowers had wilted by then, six days after the plane had plunged MARK BALDRIDGE is a senior English major. My mother had a stroke* last week, a minor stroke, one that left her just a little bit rattled. She says she’s lost some coordination on her left side. 1 “When I reach up toward my left ear my hand just sort of flies by,” she said. She also claims her speech is somewhat slurred. I found this unde tectable over the phone. , She’s seeing a neurologist now. CAT scans and MRIs later he tells her the good news is that she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. “Well, If I can remember that, I’ll tell all my friends,” she says. - The bad news is that it turns out she’s had several strokes before, she just didn’t know it until now. She’ll have to see a physical thera pist, for a while, and in the meantime they’ve got her taking an aspirin a day. into the sea Friday night It was the day JFK, Jr.'and his wife, Carolyn, were buried in the water. The 22nd of July, 1999. There were women and children, mostly. Many of them had cam corders to record the event. Camcorders are much smaller than I’d remembered them being. To the left was the grassy knoll, about half the size of what I thought it’d be. I expected a well manicured lawn, like a putting green. I found crab grass. Up the hill from the plaque were the peddlers, about ten. Conspiracy mags, newsletters, videos of the Zapruder film, all available at a low, low price of $10.99, some even low, lower than that. Business was up these days, one salesman said, in the shadows of the white pillars that adorn the site. A Kennedy death can do that. u ■ I can’t but thinking that all those John Steinbeck books were exactly right; man is inevitably linked to his land; that humans didn’t kill the first JFK, but that little space in Dallas did, just as surely as that ski slope killed Michael Kennedy, just as surely as the ocean swallowed JFK Jr” The boy’s getting tired, it seems. He wriggles out of his father’s hand. “I want to GO!” the boy screams. The father spanks him, hard. But they leave. And down the block, the boy is spanked again. He hugs his mom, slumping into her arms. They head in the direction of die museum, where one gets an up close an personal look at the Book Depository, plus the angle Lee Harvey Oswald had shoot to from to change this nation forever. I’m with Jim Garrison. No way he did it by himself. No way. “Hell,” I said a few days later, “how he could he shoot through that tree anyway? It’s right in front of him.” “Well,” columnist and JFK-site alumnus Mark Baldridge said, “the tree was probably a lot smaller 36 years ago.” Good point. The JFK memorial itself is five or six blocks away, amidst the legion of glass palaces that dot the Dallas skyline, as pretty as I’ve seen in any big city. The memorial is no feat of architecture, just four walls, raised just high enough off the ground for children to play under it, which two beautiful twin girls were. It had a lot of graffiti on it at one time; maybe they should have kept there. The thing needs a little color. Even more flowers for JFK. Jr. and that Free at last proclamation from the Warren has made it over here, too. There’s a big picture of the dearly departed and his family here, too. Ted’s in the comer of the picture, his face bloated and red. Another conspiracy museum, this one a whole lot more commercial is near by. Out front, it has a list of daily specials on a blackboard, as if it were a restaurant. Time to walk back. A family is looking at the plaque. A man, his wife, his son. The father, specifically, is eyeing a card, written by a child. It’s a regular piece of paper, folded in half with crayon stick faces at the four comers. All of them are crying. The letter is to the mother of the two Bessette women. "Sorry about the deth of your two beatful daughters,” it says in red marker. Unforgettable. Another card exclaims, “Free at last.r It babbles on about John-John passing to a better place where he can be with his father. The card is signed “The Warren Family.” The doctor is out Physical, mental ailments snowball on a hot July week “You should take one too, Marie,” she tells me. Always looking out for me, mom. I called her last night to talk about movies and books (her favorite sub jects) and to determine for myself just how much this stroke might have effected her. She seemed the same, incompre hensible, telling those long, convolut ed tales that always get me lost Just as funny (I should say witty) as always and slightly acerbic. As ever, same old mom. Her favorite film, or one of them, is “Pulp Fiction” believe it or not Probably not a lot of other 70+ year old mothers laugh like she does when that poor kid goes SPLAT all over the back of John Travolta’s car. Got a sense of humor, mom. A big fan of Thomas Harris, she’s read his sequel to the best selling “The Silence of the Lambs,” the as yet equally best selling “Hannibal,” which she pans as over-written and improbable. “A friend of mine just recently compared me to Dr. Lecter,” I tell her. “Oh you look nothing like him,” she says—and I know she’s not talk ing about Sir Anthony Hopkins. To my mother, Hannibal the Cannibal is a genuine, if fictional, person who an actor or two may have occasionally portrayed for the silver screen (see Michael Mann’s “Manhunter” for an earlier incama- / tion of everyone’s favorite psy chopath.) “Maybe she meant Thomas Harris,” she says. “Do I look like Thomas Harris?” I ask, a little incredulous. “Somewhat,” she says, “Quite a bit, actually.” A glance at his website at <www.thomasharris;com> (go fig ure) confirmed this form me. I do look quite a bit like Mr. Harris, or will, once I’ve written a couple of best sellers. At least mom’s at home, comfort able among her things. A friend of mine (I’ll call her Anne) wound up in Lincoln General over the weekend, the fifth floor, psy cho ward. She’d done herself some harm it seems and made the mistake of con fiding in a professional. “So it was either walk in here of my own free will or I’d be EPC’d to. die Regional Center,” she said. Ho* talk is full of such technical acronyms and die jargon of the health care professionals with whom she * spends, it seems, too much time. I visited her yesterday and she seemed wired and strangely relaxed, an odd mix one only finds among people on antipsychotic drugs: “The social worker comes in today and says, ‘So do you think we can release you today?’ Of course I think so, but the system is so con fused here. They’ve already done all they can for me.” Inside the hotel, an hour later, CNN is blaring. I step over to the window, look down at the site again. Beyond the knoll, behind the wadi, is the gravel parking lot, where the sec ond gunman could have fled. The train tracks where they found the “clean” hobos. It’s an amazingly confined, tight setup, perfect for the turkey shoot that has been described in various theories. The peddlers, the knoll, the museum, the cards, the two blond twins — they seem so* American, so presidential. So JFK. More than remorse, more than sadness, more than regret, I feel a strange spookiness about it all. What a plan, I think to myself, and come to my own personal realization that behind the Kennedy legacy lies this grand architectural, geographical subplot, by Oswald or whoever, that has plotted America’s course in the past three decades. I can’t but thinking that all those John Steinbeck books were exactly right; man is inevitably linked to his land; that humans didn’t kill the first JFK, but that little space in Dallas did, just as surely as that ski slope killed Michael Kennedy, just as sure ly as the ocean swallowed JFK Jr. The fallen president said it him self once, in a speech he made in 1962: “We are tied to the ocean,” he said. “And when we go back to the sea it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.” Man and his nature. An idea to live, and die, by. She reveals plans to move to another state, “Somewhere that cares about mental health more.” She thinks Nebraska is a little behind in this area. “Were like 49th in funding, you know.” Poor girl, clearly delusional. It sucks to be sick, I know. And the arcane practices of mod em medicine can be frightening, doc tors can be insensitive, hospital food bites. So I’m running around today, try ing to gather some cheer for these girls, and I don’t have time to write this stuff. I mean, they don’t make greeting cards that say. “A Stroke of Bad Luck” or “Sorry to hear you cut your self again,” do they? So I’ve just got to sit myself down, sometime before this hectic day ends, with a scissors, a pot of paste and some black construction paper, and make a couple for myself.