Everything was different after that.

You know you're getting on in years when the fiftieth anniversary of an event rolls around and you can remember it.

Five decades ago this day I was sitting in my second-grade class, doing addition and subtraction problems. It was a warm, sunny Friday afternoon in eastern North Carolina.

The principal came on the intercom and announced that the president had died and school was closing for the day. We should pack our things, leave quietly, and go home. This was back in the day when virtually everyone in that small town walked to school and it was safe to do so.

It took me about three minutes to get home. My mother had the television on CBS, one of the three TV channels available then. Walter Cronkite was handling the story on the fly.

It was an upsetting event; my mother was edgy and wanted me to sit still and not talk. I wanted to go to choir practice. She thought it would be cancelled, but let me go anyway,. I walked the ten minutes to church and she was right. I walked back home, and there began that long weekend of grainy, gray TV footage.

It was much later in life that I came to appreciate the loss of two others who died fifty years ago today- Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis.