Memoir

A Song to Cry By

24 notes, 23 words that tap every man’s soul to its depths

Eternal Flame | credit: TriggerPhoto | iStock (under standard license)

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It was cold in Washington, D.C., that day. The temperature was in the lower 40s. A chill wind blew, tugging at the buttoned neck of my winter coat and sliding up under the lower edges. To keep them warm, I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

My mother and I stood at the curb’s edge on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the stately Department of Justice Building. A deafening silence sounded from the close crowd around us, a crowd that stood transfixed. No one moved. No one jostled his neighbor. No one spoke. I learned later that a quarter-million people, standing dozens deep, lined the one-and-one-half miles of the Avenue between the White House and Capitol that morning, reverent and still against the gusting wind.

How my mother got us to that point at the curb was a mystery and a bit of a wonder. She just put me in front of her and kept gently moving forward. Somehow, the crowd separated before us, letting us pass, almost as if it knew this fifteen-year-old boy needed to be in front where he could see.

The flag-draped, horse-drawn caisson moved slowly from right to left before us, preceded by a riderless horse with tall, polished, black boots reversed in the stirrups. It was Sunday, November 24th, 1963. The Friday before, Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas. It was Kennedy’s body that the caisson carried down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House on its way to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda.

I stood grim-faced, braced against the emotion that gripped me. I determined to be brave when a bugler began playing Taps. The first three notes got me. Against my will, tears flowed over my lower lids like storm waters topping a dam and ran in rivulets down my cheeks. I wasn’t alone; the men and women around me, my mother among them, silently cried as the ghostly notes drifted on the wind overhead.

Never had I cried in public before. In fact, I hadn’t cried in front of anyone before. I had always been determined not to show that weakness. But, that day, I couldn’t stop it. My president was dead from an assassin’s bullet.

I thought of him as my president because he was young and because his clarion calls to action and service had moved me. He embodied my ideals. He was a national figure, the leader of the country, who somehow, when he spoke, spoke directly to me.

With his death came the death of promise, hope, and change in the way things were done. He was, of course, not of mine, but my parents’ generation. He was more their president than mine, something I came to appreciate only later. But, that day, he belonged to me as much as to the adult throng there to pay him homage.

Taps that day made me cry in public, and I didn’t care. Taps punched through my determination never to cry in front of anyone, just as it would the next day when it sounded again at his burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Even to this day, I cannot hear it without feeling the windy chill of that day, without tears forming where none should be, without a shiver running down my spine and my vellus hairs standing on end.

This is in response to CRY’s April 5th, 2022 call for submissions: What Song Makes You Cry?

You’ll be thinking this isn’t quite in tune with the spirit of the challenge. After all, Taps isn’t a song.

But it is, actually. There are only 24 notes and 23 words, but they make a song, do they not? Notes and words?

Day is done, Gone the sun, From the lake, From the hill, From the sky. All is well, Safely rest, God is nigh.

[embed]Bugler Plays Taps | Youtube

[embed]Taps Vocal Arrangement by Jari Villenueva

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