I’m in school when the president is shot, in science class, and the whole school files into the cafeteria to sit at the long pinkish Formica dining tables and watch the continuous broadcast from Dallas. What does it mean? Here memory adds a detail that defies chronology: while we watch the broadcast from Dealey Plaza, I’m sitting next to a girl named Paula, who has had her dark hair cut in a new way, a Beatle cut, and she actually does look like Paul McCartney, as evidenced by the hundreds of Beatle cards she brings to school in an upholstered case. Some girls, while we watch Walter Cronkite in his skinny tie and glasses, are weeping, and some are quietly passing, beneath the table, Paula’s Beatle cards.

In our depression, my mother and I have both turned to food for solace, and she soon determines that the exercise I’m getting in dance class is not enough; some additional measure must be taken to deal with the issue of our hips. We visit a doctor and each receive a prescription for diet pills, the popular new amphetamines.

These, indeed, lend to daily life a certain fizz and glitter. I dance with more spark and vigor, and my mother develops an interest in fishing. Some days (am I home from school? is it some holiday or weekend when my father’s working?) she and I go out to remote places, some quiet pier along the Indian or Banana River; we catch yellowtail, brilliant flatfish as fresh and sunny looking as sliced lemons. Over cups of black coffee (yellow plastic cups, a new kind of “china” called Melmac, curvaceous and unbreakable) and lots of cigarettes, she sits at the kitchen table and talks about kinds of fish, colors and textures of scales, new places we might try out. On one of our outings we discover the Dummit Plantation, a ruined old cypress house, boarded up, in the dark heart of an ancient orange grove, shaggy palm trees bending in the rain, bright birds flitting and calling as if they owned the place, evidence of an old Florida far from the flattened world of our cul-de-sac, our shopping center with its grocery and its Woolworth’s lined up beside the paved lake of parking lot.