11/22/63
It was a school day
like any other,
except it was Friday—
and the week before Thanksgiving.
The holidays were coming,
and even though it wasn't very cold,
we knew Christmas wasn't far off.
I was in the third grade,
young enough to believe in Santa.
The day took a change after lunch.
Our teacher was called out of the room,
and when he returned
his normally stern demeanor had shifted.
His shoulders slumped
as he took his seat behind his desk.
When he called the class to order,
his voice was different, shaky.
The whole class felt it.
Then he told us someone
had shot President Kennedy.
None of us knew what to do,
we were too young to understand
the implications of assassination.
We didn't live in a world
where gun violence was a daily occurrence.
Whispers echoed around the room.
The teacher didn't try to silence us
like he normally would have done.
He simply told us we would be dismissed
as soon as they could get the school busses back,
and to read until they came.
We were young children.
We didn't really understand.
We did what we were told
and thought it was great
to get out of school early on a Friday.
But the grownups' faces
told a different story.
They ranged from angry to sad,
and so many tears,
and not just from the women.
Something must be terribly wrong
if the men were crying too.
Over the next few days
the assassination news
was the only thing on television.
Children being children
grew tired and bored.
I remember my friend telling me
that when she moaned about it,
her mother slapped her in the face,
and told her to have respect
for the great man who'd been killed.
We were children.
We didn't know better.
November 22, 1963
was a defining moment
that changed our world forever.
If you were alive
and at an age of reasonable thinking,
you would never forget.
~Elise Skidmore ©2025
I was in the first grade. My aunt from Sweden was visiting, and I’ll always remember her meeting my brothers and me at our school bus stop in tears. I mainly remember not understanding how something like that could happen, and being very upset that the adults were so upset. It was unsettling.
As I said in the poem, I think it was a defining moment for anyone who lived through it. Anyone who was alive and of the age of reason remembers where they were and what they were doing when it happened, in the same way younger generations recall 9/11. It’s hard enough for adults to come to terms with it, but for children? Sadly, children today have more exposure to that kind of violence, so while those things have an impact, I think it was even more shocking to us because that wasn’t the world we lived in. You didn’t see that every day on the news or the internet (that wasn’t even a thing). We were more protected from the evils of the world, I think, and we had our innocence for much longer than children today. The JFK assassination was where that started.