Childhood Lessons
Bozo the Clown
was interrupted
by Walter Cronkite:
      The President is dead.
My classmates and I
were eight years old
and soon to understand that
        childhood doesn't last forever.
Less than five years later,
after a night of swimming at
the YMCA with fellow
Boy Scouts
I learned that a
bigot with a gun could
         kill a Dreamer
                (but not his dream).
And then just scant weeks later,
on a Saturday morning,
instead of watching cartoons
I would hear endlessly
"Now lets go on to
Chicago and win there"
only to see
replays of confusion
and shots fired
in a kitchen
and learn that
Rosie Greer had a
life after football.
In 1968
"Tricky Dick" Nixon
won election as president
and became an exemplar of
the importance of peristenace
before,
in 1974,
becoming a pestilance
due to the 
Watergate Hearings
that revealed him to
have plumbers on his payroll
and paranoia
in his mind.
Leading to one
final lesson:
no one,
not even a president,
is above the law.