History tells a tale, and Death paints a different picture
Writing by treason on Thursday, 28 of December , 2006 at 2:18 pm
On the day after Christmas, several hours before the news broke about the death of Gerald Ford, I was visiting my mother (a.k.a. Rocky Balboa, a.k.a. Rocky Raccoon). I knew she would have no memory of falling and breaking her nose on Christmas night. It hurt, she didn’t know why, so she kept touching it…then wondered why it hurt. Explaining the events repeatedly didn’t help much.
While I was there with her I spent some time looking at the placemat I’d bought over a year ago. It was cheap - I found it in the back to school section at Walgreens. One side lists all the U.S. presidents and their party affiliation, years served, and their vice presidents; the other side has illustrations of each, in order, numbers one through forty-three.
I reviewed the names of those who were in office during my father’s lifetime: Teddy Roosevelt (the president he was named after), Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon. My father died about two and a half weeks before his 65th birthday in 1970, yet he lived through twelve administrations. Some were short, and one was very long.
My mother has lived through eight of those, plus Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. That’s fourteen, and she’s eighty-three. My sister, who died three and a half years ago at age fifty, lived through the same number of presidents that I have. Everyone from Eisenhower to Bush 43. She was born during Ike’s first term and died during Bush’s first term. That’s ten presidents total.
We map out periods in our lives and separate our memories into manageable sections. Some use decades, conveniently, as compartments. Some use schools they attended and places they worked. Some divide by military service and wars. Others divide their lives by geography: these things happened when I lived there. Some people split the years by relationships. I was with so-and-so back then. And that was before what’s-his-name.
I tend to divide mine into chunks based on administrations. For instance, I was born in October 1959, so the Eisenhower years really didn’t exist for me; but I do remember watching JFK’s funeral on TV. My impression of the Kennedys, though, was formed mostly by the record album my siblings had played: Vaughn Meader’s The First Family. (My record collection is in boxes, and I suspect I still have that one.) I was aware of Johnson — and Him and Her. (And Yuki.) The presidential election of 1964 was a blur, but I watched the campaign coverage of Nixon and Humphrey, got hooked, and I’ve paid attention to politics ever since.
Ten presidents and only four of them survive: Carter, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. Carter and Bush 41 were born in 1924; Clinton and Bush 43 were born in 1946. I won’t guess which one will leave us first, but no matter who it is, I’ll be curious about the media’s coverage of the man and his administration.
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