Needing a haircut

My pals arrived without calling; they just drifted in the evening of Saturday, November 23. I was glad they came. My parents and I had been home alone for 24 hours. Lucie and I were supposed to see the fall high school play, "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" -- it had taken days to work up the nerve to ask her -- but they canceled the production. They canceled everything everywhere. Nothing would open all weekend, nor Monday, which would become a day of mourning. Like me, Lucie was stuck in her house. The last few weeks of 1963 promised to be dark and morbid.

Larry, David, Richard, Bobby, and I sat in the den looking at each other. Silently, on the other side of the room, the television flickered, black and white.

"We should do something," Larry said, in a voice stripped of lifeforce. His face, normally tan and cheerful, drooped.

"Let's go to a movie," David said, then paused a beat before saying, "There aren't any movies." He struggled to make his second sentence sound humorous, but failed.

Richard, Bobby and I didn't say anything. Numbness had set in, coupled with sorrow and a trace of fear. None of us privileged teens had lived through an assassination, an event that, like plagues, was supposed to be confined to our history textbook. Wasn't McKinley the last President to be shot? Now, this weekend, I missed my life. The Singing Nuns' "Dominique" played on KRLA, and it sounded so incongruous.

Today, midway (I hope) through another event that I stupidly thought was restricted to a chapter in "History of a Free People," emotions from the Kennedy assassination have returned. I start the morning numb until the headlines alarm. Eventually, I settle down into sorrow, to be replaced finally, at sundown, by fear. I've taken to titrating the news; one can tolerate numbers for only so long.

As a defense mechanism, I'm searching for silver linings, aspects of the former world that I don't miss.

I don't miss the smog.

I don't miss commuting, but have yet to take advantage of the empty freeways.

I don't miss mass shootings in our schools and our workplaces.

I don't miss high-speed police chases. Well, maybe I should admit I do at times. Viewed from my bedroom, as my wife, our dogs, and I prepare to tuck in for the night, they offer a wicked TV thrill, a game of survival in real time in which one wonders if the suspect will kill himself or others before the inevitable capture. But seriously, they're a plague on the public fisc. One did occur the night I wrote this piece, and I had no desire to watch.

Don't ask what I miss. Almost everything, but I'll mention just one. I miss the birds. Not the feathered kind; they're still with us. I'm talking about those little scooters that line our sidewalks, that you can hop on, ride anywhere, and then oh-so-casually leave anywhere. They feed into the whimsical quality that continues to bubble up here and there in Los Angeles and make our town so special.

This won't be the first time the United States started far behind only to end high. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, all 183.9 pounds of it, followed by a second satellite carrying a dog, pundits put us five years behind the Kremlin. We couldn't even get a three-pound orbiter, Vanguard 1, more than four feet off the ground before its rocket exploded. That launch became known as "Flopnik" and "kaputnik." But we know who won the Space Race. My guess is we'll come through this pandemic and may, eventually, become a world leader in public health, an era in which kids will want to grow up to become epidemiologists.

I need a haircut. 