#7

Daniel Cuevas-

On the six o'clock news you see the motorcade moving slowly along a wide sunlit street in downtown Dallas. We are watching this, Barry, Marilyn and I, while our mother and father rage in the kitchen about his affair. She has been home now for several days, and as we watch the scene unfold on TV we try to block them out. It is old news by a week or better but the broadcasters continue to play it nightly: President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, are riding in the backseat of a black Lincoln convertible. They are waving to the crowds on the side walks when he leans toward his wife as if he wants to whisper something in her ear and the side of his face explodes. Then you see Jackie rise from her seat. At first it looks as if she's trying to climb out of the car, that she's afraid for her own life. But really all she's concerned about is gathering up the pieces of her husband that landed on the back of the trunk. Her impulse is to put him back together. Of course that's impossible but it doesn't mean that there isn't beauty in the moment, in her desperateness to salvage what can't be saved. (Brown, 37)

In this quote, Brown revisits the time when he saw President John F. Kennedy get assassinated. After John F. Kennedy's assassination came a wave of grief throughout the nation because one of the most loved presidents had just been shot to death. In addition, Brown also stated that while they watching the assassination on TV, in the background his parents were arguing. Thus, they used the broadcast to distract themselves from their parents. So Brown wanted to show to us what he had to experience daily throughout his childhood, just a constant battle between his parents. Moreover, since they had to go through a lot of fights between their parents, they had to come up with a variety of ways to block them out and ignore them, because having to experience constant fighting between your parents takes a toll on your life. For example, you can get traumatized by going through harsh events like these. These events are not normal events for children like Brown and his siblings, a child as old as he was should not have to experience the conflicts between his parents. This shows to the reader that Browns parents were not good parents because they would always fight and Browns dad had an affair with another woman.