PASSING OF YEARS DOESN'T PALE FEELING OF A MOMENT IN HISTORY

It is the first question people ask in these conversations and the one you always know the answer to.

Where were you?

I remember.

I was in the second grade, Mrs. White's class, in New Madrid Elementary School. A fierce-looking cloud announced an approaching storm and the classroom was getting dark.

Perhaps it was my turn, or maybe I was just sitting close to the window, but Mrs. White picked me to adjust a troublesome window shade. It was a chore of some modest burden; these were high windows with shades that had to be hoisted up on pulleys to their upper reaches, and you had to balance yourself on a bookshelf to bring off the repair.

After some gentle tugging, the shade came free and rolled onto its spool. The class was afforded a better view of the gathering storm, and I was afforded a lofty view of my second-grade classmates looking skyward.

It was as much power as an seven-year-old needed.

I also saw Mrs. White at the classroom door, talking to a third-grade teacher who had come over from across the hall. My teacher's gasp, loud and sudden, is what I remember best. She went out the door with her colleague.

When she came back, I had returned to my seat. Mrs. White's message was brief, as I recall it: President Kennedy had been shot. Maybe she said he had been killed.

No second grader in my class knew what the word assassination meant. While Mrs. White was clearly shaken, no second grader in my view had much reaction to the news.

Yet it is unlikely that the kids seated around me that day have forgotten that Mrs. White delivered the message and what it felt like to receive it ... and what it ultimately meant to our young lives.

Within 10 minutes, sheets of water were hitting the windows.

Though the locations and circumstances vary, my reminiscence of that event 28 years ago today is no different than most Americans my age or older.

I was not old enough to buy into the JFK presidency. The Kennedy mystique occupied none of my thoughts. The country may have been invigorated by this youthful president, but I was youthful and vigorous too.

I didn't know what was lost until it was lost.

Time heals all things, it's true, but amnesia isn't part of the package. Nor is there an exemption for dead presidents of frailties that linger or descendants that cheapen a good name.

Say the name "Kennedy" today and unearthed are images of Marilyn and Mafioso, Chappaquiddick and Palm Beach.

When youngsters of the Kennedy clan get together these days, it is too often for jury selection.

There is Jackie, the first lady everyone felt on a first-name basis with. She mourned under the eyes of a nation. Now we mourn her treatment on hundreds of tabloid covers.

Oliver Stone gathers bits of history that suit him and makes a movie in the former president's name. Is it investigative cinema or just tawdry exploitation? Does it make a difference that the director thinks of it in one way and the result is the other?

In the ballyhoo of weeks gone by, some sports reporter, overwrought by events, said the day Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive would stick in the minds of people the way the JFK assassination did.

Baloney.

Camelot may have just been one brief, shining moment, but its luster is not gone entirely. And the moment we discovered it gone even if we didn't really know what it was will remain with us always.