I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown. Now.

My college girlfriend loved John F. Kennedy.

She was a political science major.

We both grew up in homes where a portrait of Kennedy

soberly hung on a wall next to a picture of Martin Luther King. I didn't share her

obsession, but I was in the same boat of respect and appreciation. One year she

organized a trip over spring break to Hyanna's port.

I know, not exactly Cancun.

We left on a Friday just in time for rush hour traffic. When we crossed the George

Washington Bridge, the large sign New England Thruway appeared and it hit me that

I had never traveled north beyond New York City.

We arrived in Cape Cod close to midnight.

The next day, we grabbed coffee at a diner and drove immediately to the JFK Memorial looking out

onto Louis Bay. In gray morning light the memorial was non-descript.

I think we were expecting an internal flame instead of a stone wall with a medallion of Kennedy's profile.

My girlfriend stood in silence and cried, as so many had that fateful

day in Dallas, Texas. I watched her shiver. I stared out into the distance at the Atlantic Ocean with gulls screeching overhead.

I watched waves repeatedly crash on the shore. I pondered our nation's history,

particularly the arrival of the ship carrying pilgrims to nearby Plymouth, and the subsequent devastating loss of life to the Wampanagh

and Nauset peoples.

I pondered the arrival of more ships and the enslavement of Africans in America and the whaling ships and

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