Reply #77: I was two years, two months, and four days old.

[Sapphocrat]

And I remember it.

I was sitting on the linoleum floor of our L-shaped kitchen at the ranch, playing with pots and pans as any two-year-old would, when my mother came in from the family room, where the television was, with one hand to her face, wearing a look of pain I will never forget. She asked me -- not told me, but asked me, in a very weak, quiet way -- if I would stop making noise. "Why?" I asked (as any two-year-old would). "Because," she said, "today is a sad day. Today is a day we don't want to make any noise."

It took some time -- all of those Four Days in November -- to connect, in my own two-year-old way, what had happened to the only thing I could relate it to: the death of a pet. But I did. And I understood then why I wasn't supposed to make noise that day.

CUT TO: PACIFIC GROVE - DAYTIME - AUNT ANNIE'S HOUSE - SOMETIME IN THE MID-1960s

Aunt Annie had lost Uncle Frank some twenty or thirty years earlier, but she still dressed in black -- until the day she died. We visited her -- my mother, my grandparents, and I -- once or twice a year. I loved going to Aunt Annie's, and I loved her. There was always a period when I would grow bored with the grown-up conversation, but it was worth it, as half the day would be spent on the windy, rocky beach, and the rest of the time we would eat far too much food at the kitchen table I would inherit some twenty years later.

Aunt Annie's home was a classic, stucco California bungalow, photos of which were featured in all the Monterey-area guidebooks due to the breathtaking mass of wisteria adorning the exterior.

I was unaware of just how "famous" Auntie Annie's house was; it was the interior that fascinated me: There wasn't a wall without a framed picture of Jack or Bobby on it, and not a surface without a memorial figurine or commemorative plate; one wall was dominated entirely by a tapestry of the two brothers.

At some point during every visit, Aunt Annie would find a moment to take me aside and into her dark bedroom, where she would show me her large, ceramic statue of St. Ann, her namesake, and tell me the story of St. Ann, and how St. Ann was the mother of the Virgin Mary... as if she had never told me a hundred times before. I didn't mind; at four, five, ten years old, I knew enough to know it made her happy to tell me again. And I felt special.

There was something else Aunt Annie would tell me -- tell anyone within earshot, in fact -- repeatedly, every time I saw her. Partly because I was less than a year younger than the heir to Camelot, but mostly because Aunt Annie loved the Kennedys more than anyone but her dear, departed Frank, she would intone, softly, with this oddly serene smile on her weathered face: "When she grows up, J- is going to marry John-John... Yes, J- is going to marry John-John..." I think she really believed it. I know she did.

CUT TO: ARLINGTON CEMETERY - EARLY MORNING - SOMETIME IN OCTOBER, 1996

It is wet, and I am sick with the flu. But I have only one full day to spend in and around Washington, D.C., and I will see The Mall, and The Wall, and Arlington, even if it kills me. And it almost does.

I wheeze like a grampus as I hike the gentle, sloping hills of Arlington to visit the women and men to whom I most want to pay my respects; if I do nothing else before I collapse from this damned thing I've been trying to kill with too much Ny-Quil and Dristan, there are four stops I must make -- and then if I have any strength left, I will visit Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Todd Lincoln.

I do visit Holmes and Lincoln, but not until after I have watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, stood silently for a very long time before the Space Shuttle Challenger memorial, and given Medgar Evers my promise to carry on.

I save the Kennedys for last. There is no one else around -- just me, and Jack, and Jackie, and Bobby. And, for the better part of an hour, I cry like a baby.

And then I have to leave. I forget just how sick I am until I find my way back to the Metro station, and I suffer badly for not taking better care of myself, throughout the drive down to North Carolina, and for another week after that.

But I don't care.

EPILOGUE

Of course I never wanted to marry John-John, even if it had been possible. But when he died, I cried like a baby, all over again.