“Where were you on the day President Kennedy was shot?”

For people of a certain age this question has become a cliché, and for others there is another about the morning of Sept. 11. 2001. Those of us who lived in the Northeast in November of 1965 can play the game by asking where we were when the lights went out. Clichés may be shopworn, but they survive because they reveal simple truths. So what is it about human nature that keeps us asking others what they were up to when a national disaster unfolded?

The first value that comes to mind is social: the phenomenon produces a network of shared experience. On Nov. 9, 1965 I was taking a shower in my college gym after hockey practice when the lights went out. Thanks to the dim light of an EXIT sign, I was able to find my way back to my locker. A friend in the same building was swimming the butterfly at the end of a long and exhausting practice, and when he came up for air into complete darkness his first thought was that he had died. We all have stories like this, and what makes them so fascinating is the shared context shaded with personal detail. Whether comic or horrific, we turn these stories into folk tales, adding color and nuance with each new telling.

There is a second value to this parlor game, far more complex than the social aspect. These historic phenomena become brilliant milestones in the somewhat opaque flow of time, moments of clear focus where we can say, “I was 18 or 20 or 56 and I remember the madeleine I was eating when I heard the news.”

It could be the hum of traffic we remember or the particular light in the sky that day, but foremost in our consciousness lies the imagery of the event cemented by the film or video we’ve seen over and over; and in sharp contrast to the terror of the moment, we see our own innocence. At the time we were blissfully unaware of what was about to occur, and more importantly we were unaware of everything that would happen in our lives from that moment forward. Looking back, we see ourselves as different people.

Unlike these milestones, most of the memories we accumulate gradually morph into a kind of fiction. Shaped by romanticism or by old frustrations, by wishful thinking or by profound doubt, they reveal subtle and layered truths; but without film or video to replay, their precision should be suspect. The assassination of a president and jets tearing into a skyscraper, on the other hand, are events you can count on to never change. When you replay them with the perspective of years, you may wish for Oswald to miss or for the planes to land safely, but all you really have is your innocence juxtaposed to horror.

I was in college and on my way to hockey practice when I heard Kennedy had been shot. The news barely registered; “shot” suggested a wound that might heal. For two hours I skated without a thought of what was happening in Dallas, and then I heard the full story. That night I went to a service in my college chapel, a building I had never entered before that somber moment. The next morning I went to my Latin class where we were reading Roman comedies, and we sat silently at a table for a few minutes until our weeping professor dismissed us.

We learn so much over a lifetime, some of it wonderful and some excruciatingly painful. I was 18 when Kennedy was killed, and I knew very little about the war in Vietnam that would eventually kill five of my schoolmates; I was unaware that in the spring of 1968 there would be two more assassinations. The woman I was about to marry and I would wonder why we would ever bring children into this world.

Of course, the design is for innocence to be lost, and in my heart and mind I would have it no other way. I remember adolescence as a time I wanted to outgrow as quickly as possible. I wanted to be an adult, to drive a car, and experience sex. I remember adolescence also as a time when I wanted to un-learn some of the more troubling truths that came with experience. This tension is what makes the “Where were you when…?” game so interesting.

Who doesn’t take comfort imagining a more innocent self? What my wife and I didn’t understand when we fretted about bringing children into a terrifying world is that children are themselves the reason we should.

Children arrive in a state of pure innocence, but it is in their growth, their gradual loss of innocence that we can imagine a better world. My granddaughter is nearly 7, and whenever I use a word she doesn’t know, she wants to know its meaning. I don’t expect any of my grandchildren to save the world (well, maybe on days when I am foolishly proud), but I can’t help thinking she and her generation will do a better job than we did.

They will have their shot, and one day with friends or strangers they are likely to look back on a time when things ran amok and ask, “Where were you on that day?”

Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford.

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