Full Circle. Michael Thomas Ford

of James Buchanan Junior High School. Even our grade level was symbolic of our position, sandwiched as it was between the relative safety of the sixth and the restless excitement of the eighth, the springboard into what we believed (wrongly, we would find out soon enough) the total freedom of high school. Trapped in this limbo, we wandered the halls of a school named for the only Pennsylvanian to hold the highest office in the land. Buchanan, incidentally, was also the only bachelor president, a fact which might have comforted a few of us had we understood its potential significance to our own lives. At the time, we were too preoccupied with being embarrassed about everything to care.

      We were a group of little wolves, men disguised as boys, trying to both remain a pack and forge our own paths. We pretended to be ready to take on anything, all the while scared to death that we would fail. We staged mock battles in the guise of football games and science club experiments, fighting for the chance to be king, if only for a moment, the other boys our grudgingly worshipful subjects until it was their turn. Most of all, we rode the swells of our emotions up one side and down another, startled at the ferocity of our feelings.

      In the midst of all this, on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, as we impatiently awaited the arrival of Thanksgiving vacation and the promise of pumpkin pie, the world came to a standstill with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. People of my age are frequently asked if they remember what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy had been shot. I do, of course, for more than one reason. It was a little past two o’clock, and I was standing in the locker room of the school’s gym. I was looking, but trying not to, at the penis belonging to a boy with the unfortunate name of William Williams. We called him, of course, Bill. Tall and beginning to fill out with the muscles that would make him the formidable man he eventually became, Bill was the current frontrunner in the race in which we were all feverishly participating.

      I was pulling my T-shirt over my head, using the opportunity to peer from beneath its temporary shield for a lingering look at what hung between Bill’s legs and comparing it, unfavorably, to what lay cradled in the cup of my jockstrap. It was the last class period of the day, the only thing standing between us and a week free from classes, textbooks, and tests. There were two new Hardy Boys novels awaiting me at home, and for that brief moment even the looming threat of dodge-ball and the victory of Bill’s superior penis over mine couldn’t bring me down.

      Then Coach Stellinger walked in, his ever-present clipboard held at his side, and asked for our attention. We listened as, tears flowing from his eyes, he informed us of the death of the man who had promised to bring about a brave new world. School, he said in a voice shaking with unconcealed sadness, was to be dismissed early so that we could return to our families for comfort. We were told to get dressed and report to our homerooms as quickly as possible.

      I walked home with Jack through a world that seemed to have come to a standstill. The policeman who waved us across the street had cheeks wet with grief, and even the dogs in the yards were quiet as we passed, as if they knew that life had forever changed. We stopped first at Jack’s house and, finding it empty, went on to mine, where we discovered our mothers in the kitchen, teacups untouched as they awaited further news—any news—that would reverse time and make everything all right again.

      That night Jack was allowed to sleep over, and instead of our usual arrangement of sleeping bags downstairs, we shared my bed. In the darkness, the moonlight illuminating the model rocket ships that hung from the ceiling, we talked awkwardly of our feelings about the murder of a man we didn’t know, but whose loss we understood to be great.

      I don’t recall the words we exchanged. What I remember is the feeling of Jack’s body next to mine. We’d slept together before, but that night it felt like the first time. Perhaps, electrified by the nation’s shared heartache, I was filled as with the Holy Ghost, my soul expanding beyond reason and amplifying every feeling. When Jack’s leg brushed against mine as he shifted beneath the blanket, I held my breath, both wanting the moment to end and wanting it to go on forever. When he didn’t move, the warmth of his skin seared itself into me. His words became meaningless, and mine back to him instantly forgotten. My head swam with feelings of loss coupled with a growing excitement I couldn’t explain. Horrified, I felt myself growing hard, and was instantly ashamed. I shut my eyes and willed myself to think about the president, his head burst open and his blood spilling across the pink field of Jackie’s lap as her screams rent the air. Like a martyr tempted and beseeching God for aid, I looked into her face and asked for forgiveness.

      Beside me, Jack faded into sleep. As he did, his hand slipped from where it rested on his chest and fell atop mine. I let it stay there, the beat of his heart transferred to me through his fingertips, until eventually I was overcome by tiredness and confusion and my mind saved itself by rendering me unconscious. My sleep that night was filled with visions of many things, of gunshots and people running in blind panic, of Bill Williams gently soaping his chest beneath a spray of water, of rockets and falling angels. When I woke up, I knew that not only the world, but I had changed forever.

      Next to me, Jack was on his side, turned away and snoring gently. I resisted an urge to put my arm around him and pull him close, my chest to his back. Instead, I turned away, pressing my hands against my belly as if in prayer. It was then I discovered that my pajamas were stained with the milkiness of dreams.

      CHAPTER 3

      I often tell my first-year students that when attempting to understand history, it’s crucial to ask yourself what the defining moments are. They nod in agreement, as if this is something they themselves have stated repeatedly to their friends. Then I ask them to name some of these moments. Inevitably, they rattle off a predictable list of battles, or discoveries, or inventions, and label these the points at which civilization took the next great leap forward: the harnessing of electric power, the ascendance of George of Hanover to the throne of England, the bombing of Hiroshima. These, they tell me with confidence, are the pivots on which the course of history has turned.

      I then inform them, gently but firmly, that they are wrong. I tell them that the examples that they’ve listed are the manifestations of the turning points. The actual points themselves occurred earlier, probably in unremarkable places and under mundane circumstances, and will in most cases never be publicly known. They occurred in laundries, on trains, and in the holds of ships. They occurred while someone was standing on a hilltop in winter looking at the falling snow and thinking that it might provide excellent cover for an early-morning assault on the camp of the enemy below, in a bed where one or the other of a pair of sated lovers suggested that life might be more agreeable if an inconvenient spouse were done away with, and during a tedious sermon when an uncomfortable congregant’s attention turned from the glory of God to the problem of ill-fitting trousers.

      These seemingly unimportant moments, noticed by none but those to whom they happen, are the real history of the world. The parts seen by the rest of us, the results documented in artworks, written about in poetry, and celebrated in songs and statues, are the outcome of individual decisions. The bombing of Hiroshima, although spectacular and dreadful, would not have occurred unless someone somewhere had decided that the best way to get the attention of Japan’s leaders was to present them with a display so terrible as to wipe away every trace of hope they held of victory, regardless of the human loss. The instant that decision was made and steps were taken to realize it is the instant at which history was made, not the well-documented moment when bombardier Thomas Ferebee pulled the lever that released Little Boy from the belly of the Enola Gay.

      My students, when I tell them these things, look at me in either surprise or anger. It has never occurred to them that their field of interest is based almost entirely on moments they can never truly be witness to. They resent this deeply. They are bitter over the fact that although they can read numerous and lively accounts of the French Revolution and the role of the sans-culottes in bringing the monarchy of Louis XVI to its bloody, headless end, they can’t possibly know the exact moment when the first laborer decided enough was enough and chose to do something about it. They cannot, no matter how much they read, know what possessed the first person to eat an oyster to suck such a peculiar creature from its shell, or what sequence of events (the sudden desire to go for a walk to escape the tedium of a boring text? an invitation from a friend? an attempt to impress a love interest?)