16 August, 2007

Elvis RIP

I can't believe it's been 30 years.

I remember the day Elvis died.

In the summer of 1977, we left South Dakota and moved to Tennessee. On the morning of June 11, I remember watching the morning news as the movers came to load the moving van. James Earl Ray (the man who shot Martin Luther King, Jr.) had just escaped from from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in East Tennessee. It didn't bother me so much that a killer was loose. I figured that he was important enough that the police and FBI would catch him again. But the reporter said that he was in the "snake-infested hills of East Tennessee." I remember looking at my dad and saying, "Do we really have to move there?"

My parents had tried to find a house for us, but with no success, so we moved from a three-bedroom single-family house in South Dakota into a two-bedroom apartment on the top of one of those snake-infested hills in East Tennessee. There were six of us in those days: Mom, Dad, me, my two brothers, and our wonderful dog Cuddles. I think the boys shared a bedroom, or maybe my youngest brother slept in Mom and Dad's room. I slept on the couch in the living room.

On the day Elvis died, it seemed like the world was going to end. I don't think I had ever heard such wailing in my life. I knew who Elvis was, and I'd heard his songs, but I had never been to Graceland, or anything like that, and I had no idea that other people were so crazy about him. I'm sure that it wasn't such a big deal back in South Dakota. The mom in the family across the hall from us went to bed for weeks when Elvis died. She was too grief-stricken to do anything. Her husband would come by our apartment and ask my mom questions on how to cook things like hot dogs. He was afraid to ask his wife.

I remember being so stressed about having to go to a new school, and not knowing if I would fit in, and wondering if I was ever going to get enough sleep at night in that apartment.

There are several events I remember in my life. I'm too young to remember when President Kennedy got shot, but I do remember when Nixon resigned. I remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after take-off and when the Columbia exploded over Texas. I remember when the World Trade Center Towers fell and the sound of the plane hitting the Pentagon that day. And I remember the eerie sound of screaming when Elvis died.

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