people disagreeing everywhere you look

When I was two years old, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House, leaving the "job" of Being President for the newly elected John F. Kennedy.  But of course even though I was alive, I was too little to  know those kinds of things so I don't remember it, only know it from learning, later....

Eisenhower had been elected to a four-year term, and then re-elected for another four-year term, in the 50s, and he left office in a -- "normal" way -- an orderly way, the way it's supposed to be.  The way our system is set up.

But I don't remember that, and my experience of presidents leaving office, from the time I was 5 up to 18-years-old -- my entire growing-up years -- was, that every one of them, every president, left under unusual circumstances.

Kennedy, assassinated
Johnson, decided not to run for re-election
Nixon, resigned

None of these was
normal, or
orderly, or
the way it's supposed to be.

I thought of that recently, and I don't think I put that together in my head when I was in high school -- but looking back now, with perspective of distance, I think, "Man that's weird." 

In my lifetime since I've been old enough to remember, the first president to exit the office in a normal, orderly way was Gerald Ford, in 1977.

I look at it now, and ask myself, How did I know what was normal and what wasn't?  Life experience had shown me presidents exiting office under weird circumstances.  Somehow I knew it wasn't normal, it wasn't right, it wasn't the way it was supposed to be.

Same with the assassinations --
President Kennedy,
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bobby Kennedy --

from age 5 to age 9 in my existence those occurred, yet I knew that wasn't normal; I don't know how I knew -- well, they teach you in church, No Killing; and could hear the adults talking....

When Martin Luther King was killed, this old man next door was talking to my dad--it was in Rootstown, Ohio, and our neighbors across the driveway had a grandpa living with them, and he spent most of his time out in the garage.  (That sounds terrible -- like they stuck the old guy out there, or something...but it really wasn't bad.  The garage was nice, really, and attractive -- it was built to look like a barn, and "the old man," as my father referred to him, had made himself a space out there -- a chair with a small stand next to it, and he just liked to be out there -- he tended to cats and just -- watched the world go by, I guess.  He seemed gruff, to me -- I wouldn't have gone over to talk to him, myself, but my dad would go over...)

And when King was killed -- I had heard it, somehow, and so I knew what the "old man" meant when he said to my dad, in that gentle, musing, watching-the-traffic-roll-by sort of tone that some older folks use when they mention something they heard in the news, "They killed that n----r..."

My dad said, in a the-tomatoes-should-be-ripe-soon tone of voice, "Mmh--we don't use that word anymore.  Now we say Negro."

-30-