Everyone will be talking about where everyone was that day. Except that “everyone” in this country now means fewer than one in four people — those of us who were alive and of an age to have had memories on November 22, 1963.
My experience was wildly atypical, for sure. I was nine time zones away, alone, in a tiny stone farmhouse in the French Alps. There was a phone. (Its number was “Le Cinq a Lans.”) It was connected to a switchboard in the nearby (half-hour walk) town post office and general store which was open, more or less, eight or nine hours a day except for three or so hours at lunch. When it was closed, there was no phone service.
There was a radio, and on it I began to hear frantic voices, some time in the early evening. I had been in France less than a month on what turned out to be more than a three year stay, at the end of which I was pretty much bilingual. But at that point my high school French, augmented by a lot of reading, was nowhere near up to the task of understanding what was going on. “Kennedy” “condition grave” “assassinat” bounced around, incoherently.
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