Snapshot

Woke this morning with a certain yet ineffable sense of sadness over the loss of the most iconic peer of my generation. Only after checking the morning’s newsfeeds do I learn this is the 25th anniversary of the day that single-engine Piper Saratoga plummeted into the ocean plunging JFK Jr, Carolyn and Lauren Bessette to their untimely deaths.

       Perhaps the flurry of media attention revisiting the tragedy stirred latent thoughts in my subconscious. There was the People magazine cover story on my sister-in-law’s garden furniture last weekend, among the litany of reminders popping up yet upstaged by coverage of another President in the crosshairs off an assassin’s bullet.

       Upon realizing the gravity of this day, I return in my head to the time and place where I first heard of the aircraft missing at sea en route to a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard. I remember who I was with and how stunned we all were. It is one of those seminal events sealed in the memory of a generation; hauntingly reminiscent of another halting moment 36 years earlier.

       I am drawn to this morning’s look back posted on Katie Couric’s ‘Wake Up Call’ featuring a snippet of her last interview with the fallen son of the slain President, which turned out to be his last interview as well. It’s augmented by a conversation with the author of one of the new books about the lives of John and Carolyn. Among the remarks cited while reflecting on the culture of celebrity in which they resided at the epicenter, Elizabeth Beller observes, “It was a sport and a pastime to have JFK Jr sightings around New York City.” Couric channels the zeitgeist of those frenzied days in the early 1990s when unsuspecting bystanders would suddenly find themselves having an A-list encounter. “I saw him running in the park, I saw him kicking a soccer ball without a shirt,” she intones with breathless delight. Beller recalls, “One of the few times I saw him, he was rollerblading up Columbus…and he had his shirt off and was holding a pizza box above his head. Everybody on the street stops.”

       Such voyeurism reared its head for me a decade earlier when I found myself lounging on the College Green one Spring day of my senior year at Brown where John was a sophomore at the time. He was tossing a frisbee with some fraternity brothers on a nearby patch of grass. It so happened that I had my Instamatic camera on hand loaded with a cartridge of Kodak 126 color that produced square format images long before Instagram was even conceived. In an era before ubiquitous camera phones, such happenstance provided a rare opportunity to capture a frame of the shirtless Adonis that would bear testimony of our collegiate proximity even as the glossy print would remain buried in an envelope for decades so as not to violate the privacy of this public figure.

       All these years later, as new accounts of old stories resurface in the form of death anniversary book releases, I extract the step stool from my laundry room and climb to the top of my closet where cartons containing vintage photos are stacked and largely forgotten. I pull down the box that predates my children, my marriage, my professional life, and I locate a snapshot that suddenly feels timely after 43 years.

       John and I would meet again the following year in another city (see Jackie & Me). We’d had previous encounters over the years, including his visit to my dorm room to retrieve the wallet he left behind in the Rockefeller Library periodicals room where I worked, but that’s another story.

       I pause to consider the fact that John F Kennedy Jr and I were the same age, attending the same university. One of us was the son of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and the President of the United States; the other the offspring of Russian immigrants who arrived on American shores at the threshold of the Great Depression. One remembers the other, though the reciprocal case would be unlikely had the latter lived to see this day. In the brief and shining moment that we were students together, one thing we had in common was never imagining how our respective narratives would play out in the years ahead. It’s a lesson for us all.

       On this sad occasion of his fateful final ride, may his memory be a blessing.