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A Date That’s Hard to Forget
I know a Good Story / November 22, 2016

Our cultural memory is built around a series of events that resound in our collective memory.  Some of these are good like the date man first walked on the moon, but many are terrible to recall.  Yet we recall them when each anniversary comes around and remember where we were when “it” happened. For my Dad, his first “It” date was December 7, 1941.  His childhood memories were divided by the day he went fishing and came home to a country at war.   For me and a lot of other Baby Boomers, our first “It” day is today.  November 22, 1963.  President Kennedy’s assassination threw such a big rock in our river of memory that the ripples hit our personal lives.   Those ripples are one of the big themes in the King novel titled with that date.  In a way, it’s a normal time-travel tale: a man goes back in time to prevent something bad and finds out success can breed a bigger failure.  In another way, it’s much more than that; it’s a tour of history and a trip through a human heart. King’s research in story tale showed me I don’t know very much about the…