I have a brother and once I had high hopes for him. This would have been 1963 so he would have been nine. It was the weekend of the first Kennedy assassination and we had the TV on like everyone. Sunday morning we watched Lee Harvey Oswald catch a bullet from Jack Ruby in real time and Mom said she could swear Oswald knew that man. Meanwhile, Brother had dragged our sister’s dollhouse into his room, with six small human figures and all their furnishings. He moved the bathtub downstairs to the family’s wallpapered parlor, then laid one of the tiny humans inside and placed the others in a semicircle around the tub, a band of plastic mourners. He did all the voices himself—the sobbing, the wailing, the muffled sniffles, the mother screaming now you’ve gone and done it you bastard. By the time of the second Kennedy hit Brother was almost fourteen and still holed up in his room, only now with a radio tuned to the air traffic control frequency, scanning for a Boeing 707 to crash in our backyard on final approach. Brother turned into a man who sells brake shoes.
Discussion about this post
No posts
I think Mom was right - he knew that man.
A big story told in simple lines of a poem. A good one.