I can't help thinking of how life hurtled on for everyone else beyond this point. In the life of the nation, one presidency ended and Lyndon Johnson's began. It's quite a punctuation mark.
All this happened nearly 50 years ago (50 years ago, next year in fact). It's history. It happened 'before my time', in the words of the majority of people I know. But so much of it seems to have happened in the modern day: Kennedy's motorcade was flanked by police motorcyclists, the story was covered on live national TV, there are colour images...
So often in the US, history is here in the ever-present. It gives me goosebumps. You can still kind of follow the route:
even if some of the buildings have changed.
I remember when I was interviewing Michael Daugherty about his opera, Jackie O. I asked him if he'd had any contact with the Kennedy family while writing it. No, he had said, but at the premiere he was introduced to Nellie Connally, one of the patrons of the Houston Grand Opera (the commissioning company). He said she'd been very moved. 'And she was', he said, or words to this effect, 'the wife of the Governor of Texas at the time.' I held my breath: '...and sitting in the front seat of the car the day President Kennedy was shot.'
As I repeat to myself, it's one of the sombre realisations I had here at Dealey Plaza: History is printed on the present here.
And what makes this even more overwhelming is that in America, the moments in history and the issues they turn on are huge - civil rights, the extent of liberty, the rapprochement between East and West, the highest stakes... moon landings, for heaven's sake.
This is why I have always thought their stories were ripe for telling on an operatic scale. However, in the past few weeks I've discovered an Australian story which I think is on the same scale. Of that more anon...
Fifth day here in Dallas and the impressions have become more nuanced. Last night walking back, we heard the most ornate birdsong - in the middle of this glassy skyscraper-scape. I love the big advertisements on the blank walls of buildings.
Later on I might walk over the Dallas Museum of Art. They've got an exhibition of paintings by the 20th century German Expressionist, George Grosz. He came to Dallas and painted it in the 1950s. The exhibition is called Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas.
http://dallasmuseumofart.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_410984
Fascinating what you see, if you stay and look long enough.
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