Remembering That Day in 1963

The day was November 22, 1963, and I was getting pretty comfortable in the third month of first grade at Our Lady of Peace. I had been so lonely the previous year, when we moved back to Erie from California, and my brothers left me every day for school. OLP didn’t have kindergarten in those days, and the public school didn’t have a bus for kindergarten, so I sat out a year, waiting.

Instead of doing whatever they did in kindergarten, and being new to the neighborhood, I often played with Jimmy Brown, a year or so younger than me. One day, to pass the time, as we perched on the branches of a neighbor’s tree, I told Jimmy that a lion had escaped from the zoo, and we would have to stay up there to be safe. We were up there quite a while that day peering through the leaves for signs of the escaped beast.

Finally, in September of 1963, decked out in my crisp white, Peter-Pan-collared blouse under a stiff navy jumper, I plunged into first-grade curriculum with verve. Sitting at the dining-room table in the evenings with my brothers, I observed them working on extra-credit projects, so I did some of my own extra-credit work, and the next day, standing in front of Sister Danielle’s polished oak desk, holding a stack of penciled loose-leaf paper, I was advised that there was no extra credit in first grade.

Although Sister Danielle denied my extra credit, she was one of the kindest teachers I ever had at Our Lady of Peace. She best expressed this virtue on a grey day in November, a day imprinted on my heart as firmly as the days that I watched the space shuttles explode or the towers crumble.

On November 22, 1963, sitting in a front desk, near the classroom door, I paused with my classmates and teacher to listen to Sister Mary Rita’s announcement over the loudspeaker. President Kennedy had been shot. At six years old, I was in love with JFK and his family. His daughter, Caroline, was just a little older than I was. They were Catholic, like us.

Skeptical and to clarify, I said to the students around me, “Did she say he was shot, or he was shocked?” The former was unthinkable, and I was sure that everyone was misinterpreting the principal’s message; that everything was fine with my President, that he had gotten himself a jolt of electricity, somehow.

A short time later, another announcement was made. My President was dead. I tucked my face into my folded arms on my desk and wept. Embarrassed, I listened to my classmates’ reaction to my dramatic response.

Then, I felt Sister Danielle’s gentle hands lift my arms, and she guided me out of the classroom. In the hallway, she knelt so that her face, framed by the stiff, white coif, was level with mine. She assured me that there was nothing wrong with crying, and she told me that I felt things more intensely than the rest of the children. After Sister helped me to compose myself, we returned to the classroom where she attended to the rest of the students.

Now, fifty years later, my memory of that awful day in 1963 is forever joined by the memory of a teacher’s kindness.

Whether it’s a senseless killing, a tragic accident, or an act of God, in this world of light and dark, I think tragedies that touch us all give us reason to reach out to others who are feeling the same pain. Sister Danielle was in the midst of her own grief, and she set it aside to comfort her students.

You’ve probably heard that you can find good in everything. That might be hard to rationalize, but I believe that this “good” is found in the kindness we show one another in the midst of such tragedies, and later, in the memories of those actions.