Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this ?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

-- from "Grass", Carl Sandburg (1918)

I took a new job last week, a mile or two north of downtown Dallas, forty miles from where I currently live. Yesterday (Saturday), I drove down there with a friend to show her the neighborhood, which is a fine example of urban funk -- I'm thinking about moving there once I'm offered the permanent position (I'm a temp for now).

Before that, though, we went to Dealey Plaza.

The sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository is now a museum (with additional space for temporary exhibits on the seventh floor). One arrives there by way of a new elevator added to the rear of the building that has only three stops: 1, 6 and 7. Walking into the building proper, it requires a conscious effort to distract one's attention upwards from the exhibits to the ceiling -- where there is, in fact, no ceiling, but the 100-year-old heavy timbers and concrete typical of warehouses. The freight elevators in use in 1963 are permanently parked at the 6th floor, as well.

Following the path of the exhibit past "The Early Sixties" retrospective, one then learns a bit about the Texas trip, the political strategy behind it, and what transpired in the day or two before Dallas (I believe that was the only new thing I learned, having lived far from Texas in those years).

Suddenly, thanks to some cleverly placed partitions, one finds oneself at the front of the building, approaching the southeast corner "from behind", as it were. Behind glass, the curators have stacked book boxes to precisely duplicate the crime scene photographs, down to the labels and stenciling on the boxes. The window is raised (with a new piece of glass to fill the opening below the sash). The only thing missing are three empty cartridges on the rough wood floor below the sill.

The opposite corner of the building is also in its original state, with more book boxes stacked to match history: where Oswald tossed the rifle before running down the original stairs (still there) to try to blend in and escape.

The whole front wall is also retained without adornment, except for an extra layer of glass at each window, and the view down to Elm Street and the plaza is nearly as unobstructed as it was 43 years ago.

My friend and I then left the building and walked the four blocks to the Kennedy memorial cenotaph -- a singularly uninspiring concrete box, so neutralized as to be devoid of meaning, save the inscription to explain what it is for. Then we walked back to Dealey Plaza from a different direction, unintentionally following the motorcade route (incidentally, downtown Dallas is nearly deserted on a Saturday afternoon). Turning the corner onto Houston Street, one immediately looks up to that sixth floor window, which is now permanently, ominously open. Before leaving, we spent a few minutes on the grassy knoll, almost exactly where Zapruder was standing with his movie camera.

There are hawkers outside the building on Elm Street, competing to sell slightly different souvenier retellings, crudely printed in tabloid form, and encouraging visitors to go to the "conspiracy museum" located near the cenotaph (we didn't go there). The road sign which obstructed Zapruder's view for a critical fraction of a second is long gone... but there are two small X's painted on Elm Street to mark the location of the limosine when each of the successful shots found its target.

It took us a while, and a lot of discussion, to realize the single best word to describe our reaction to being in the place burned into our memories (my friend is three years younger, and was in fourth grade in '63). The word is anticlimactic. It is 43 years later, and other things have occurred in our lives and in the world... and perhaps that's all it is: not the fading of memory with the passage of time -- all of it was as clear yesterday as it was when it occurred -- but a reshuffling of priorities.

Still, we wondered aloud, "If we who lived through it now feel so detached, what are the reactions of the young visitors, and the foreigners who come here?"

In 2045, what will visitors to Manhattan feel at Ground Zero?


I am the grass.
Let me work.