...
I hate to sound like a broken record, but this is just too important. It would have been vital in any case of someone wrongly accused of murder, but in this case the gravity of it is so much more that it crunches you to the center of the earth. I knew it at the time, but I was still three months shy of eleven, and people couldn't listen.
It wasn't just that I'd known instantly upon seeing Oswald's face on TV that he was innocent. It was also that I'd been shushed and frowned at when I brought up LBJ. Even in those days you couldn't be ten and not know that bad men had good men killed, that greedheads sometimes were immune enough from morals to do something like this. And I quickly learned I was not to be speculating about things like that... even though I was not speculating.
I wasn't "normal". My mother had done a darn good job of keeping that under wraps, and I'd gotten pretty good at keeping it from her notice, but surely in a situation like this I should do my best? Surely? Nope. Not even in the case of murder.
Since I was a baby I was weird. I talked wrong. I used full sentences when I was one year old. I popped up with comments around adults that were a little too close to the bone for a little girl to be putting into the stream of consciousness. It was lucky for me that I was so young. People could get a laugh out of it, discount it because it was so entertaining. But I also had this bad habit of foretelling how things would turn out. I was my dad's map woman on vacations when I was three, despite my mouth always trying to say the wrong direction. We just agreed I should point instead of say.
Always had a problem with meat space mirroring into itself in mind space. It was some airy form of dyslexia that wasn't dyslexic, except for a tendency to transpose numbers, but gave me trouble with right from left getting out my mouth correctly, making me tense whenever numbers were at hand, and giving me brain flops in geometry... until I was something like twenty years old. Turned out the problem had been the world trying to make me do these things its way. I had no trouble whatever when I could just do it mine.
Anyway, in that very first split second I knew Oswald was innocent, and I knew he was not just some poor sap they'd picked at random, but I could not quite put my finger on how neither was he a conspirator against Kennedy. He was part of it, but he was wonderful. I knew it in that fraction of a second. It took nearly fifty years to get the missing piece, but I got it.
I want you to have it.
