67 I Remember When

November 22, 1963, at 12:30 Central Standard Time is a time that everyone remembers. They not only remember where they were, but what they were doing, and maybe even the type of day it was.

In my world it was a bleak Friday and I was peering at an embalmed tomcat in a lab stinking of formaldehyde. I love cats but I am not crazy about dead tomcats stinking of formaldehyde. What’s more it was eating the very skin off my fingers, the formaldehyde, not the tomcat, and my eyes and nose burned like they were on fire from the fumes. I was giving my best shot this time, as I had attempted the same course some two years earlier, barely getting out of the class before the bailout deadline. This bothered me somewhat and I had determined to make a go of it come hell or high water. My eventual goal, which I never managed to attain, was to enter dental school at Loma Linda University. So here I was, with nothing better to do on this dreary Friday afternoon, then wile away the hours over a dead cat in the hopes of passing the next lab test.

As my focus was solely on the tomcat and identifying some particular protuberance on the femur of the cat’s hind leg, along with its obtuse sounding name, it is a wonder that I even twigged to the import of what I heard on a student’s radio as he walked by just outside the lab. In fact if the window hadn’t been slightly ajar because of the noxious fumes, I would have missed probably the most important news of the decade.

It was quite a shock when the full impact of John F. Kennedy’s assassination hit me and completely took my focus off what I was doing. As sad as the story even today makes me feel, when my mind goes back to that horrific day and the impact it had on society and perhaps even the world, I realize more then ever, it is up to us to strive to make the world a better place and share the message of love and acceptance that the good book teaches.

I did pass the anatomy course with a better then average mark, but it would not have satisfied those on the admittance committee of the Loma Linda School of Dentistry.