Mental Tangents

You can never tell where your mind is going to go when sparked by an idea, an occurrence, an event. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy. Like most people who were alive at the time I remember where I was when I heard the news. I even remember from whom I heard it. I had just left physical education class and I was walking to my next class in junior high school. Clark Weldon was running down the corridor yelling that the president had been killed. For the next four days we were glued to the television, hungry for news, hungry for images. Seeing Lee Harvey Oswald get killed shocked and appalled me--it was nothing like the movies I had grown up on.

Simultaneous to everything else that was going on was all the background gossip and investigation about who could have done this thing and why. That's where my memories went with all of the replaying during the week of Ruby shooting Oswald. Several years previous to the assassination, my family and I lived in a small town in western Pennsylvania that was a notorious mob town run by the Mannarino brothers. My father was an officer in the US Army and had nothing to do with the mob, but I was best friends with Dolores Mannarino for a while. One of the rackets that involved the Mannarino brothers was gambling in Cuba before the revolution. Supposedly the brothers were angry that Kennedy was inept at returning Cuba to Bautista and the mob so they were closely investigated as possible contractors for Kennedy's assassination.

Anyway, I used to go to Dolores's house to play after school. She was an only child and very indulged but going there was pretty strange. Her mother always had rough men in the kitchen playing cards, sometimes with guns visible, always with rolls of money on the table. Her father was wanted by the FBI so he was clearly not around. Dolores and I were friends until the day I told her her father was a gangster. I am not sure why I told her that truth--we were both somewhere between seven and nine years old so what memories I have of it are that she was bragging about her father and I wanted to counter those brags. Anyway, she told me to go home so I left. By the time I got home my mother was in the front yard looking pretty frantic. She told me I had to go back to Dolores's house right away and apologize and tell her that I had lied. Of course at that age I was taken aback that my mother was asking me to lie after telling me to always tell the truth no matter what. But she was very insistent that I go back and lie. I never saw Dolores again after that and shortly after my family moved to California, to Monterey for the Army Language School.

Needless to say making Dolores cry was a very bad idea. Her mother threatened my life during my walk back home. The only lesson I learned was that parents couldn't  be trusted.