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President John F Kennedy, and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, pictured just before Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Joe Bennett can’t remember what he was doing when he first heard about the shooting.
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright
OPINION: 2023 isn’t a proper year. A proper year was 1963 when I was 6 and unblighted by pubic hair or self-consciousness. 1963 went on forever. Or 1975, when I had hair everywhere and a little motorbike. 1975 didn’t last quite as long as 1963 but it still went on a bit and more stuff happened in a week than happens in a decade now.
Proper years petered out around the same time as beer began to grow weak, and since the turn of the century the years have run like rabbits. The only way I managed to keep track of the date was by writing cheques, but now they’ve gone and I’ve given up.
JOANNE NAISH/STUFF
Westland district councillor Latham Martin suffered massive internal bleeding after being hit in the chest with a stone while weed eating in Hokitika.
A friend once told me that the sense of time accelerating as we age is logarithmic. I was impressed and wrote a column about it, but even back then I had only the vaguest sense of what logarithmic meant and now I have none at all.
So we know that the length of 2023 will vary according to your age. We also know that stuff will happen in 2023 that will be considered important and will become part of that strange thing known as history.
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In 1963 Kennedy was shot. Everyone is supposed to know where they were when they heard but I don’t. I’m sure I did hear but I dismissed it as unimportant and carried on with things of greater importance such as catching grasshoppers or eating scabs and snot. What’s Kennedy to me or I to Kennedy? I might have said – though probably not because I was a grammatical pedant even then.
In 1975 the Vietnam war ended, having brought only death to thousands and misery to millions and so being very historical. By now I was more aware of the world beyond the reach of my senses, but I’d also become the victim of propaganda. If asked I’d have sided with the Americans over the North Vietnamese. But thankfully I wasn’t asked and there was other stuff that mattered to me and I got on with it.
Plenty of history will happen in 2023. One likes to think, for example, that Putin and Trump will suffer spectacular reversals. But history is mainly Trumps and Putins and few get what they deserve and there are always more to replace them.
It was Voltaire who noted that history is an ugly business and we are best off out of it. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, he declared, tend your own garden. And it was in the light of this advice that in the last days of 2022 I headed up my section with a two-stroke weed eater. The section is steep. One foot slipped. I put the other down to save me. It slipped too.
In 1963 I was adept at the backward roll, but time passes and one loses the knack. This backward roll was the first I’d performed for at least 30 years and the first ever with a weed eater. When I came to rest the weed eater was two-stroking beside my skull and I had done something less than amusing to a rib.
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Joe Bennett: “In 1963 Kennedy was shot. Everyone is supposed to know where they were when they heard but I don’t.”
The net result four days later is that the rib is fine so long as I don’t laugh, cough, snort, sneeze, or try to get up from a lying position. So when I woke on the first of January and made to get out of bed and greet 2023, the very first noise I made was a wordless howl. Just as it was on the first day of my life. Some things change but most things stay the same.
Happy new year.
