Remembering

S M Chen
5 min readNov 30, 2024

There are a few things that stick in memory.

I remember the day JFK was assassinated on 11/22/1963.

I was sketching a street scene from Rue de la Paix in Paris.

I had gotten off early from graduate school class.

The occasional bright colors I applied to art paper would contrast with the grey monotones of events of that day.

I was living with a roommate in the back apartment of a middle-aged French couple near Los Angeles.

They had a couple disagreeable small dogs which insisted on nipping our ankles despite our having been there the better part of a year.

I recall the words attributed to W C Fields: “Anyone who dislikes… small dogs cannot be all bad.”

I was determined not to own a dachshund in the future.

I recall exactly what I was doing on 9/11/2001.

Almost 38 years later, I was having breakfast near the fireplace in my townhome near Los Angeles when one of my children called with the chilling news.

“Turn on the TV,” they admonished.

Other than those two events, life has often been a blur.

The mundane mixed in with the not-so.

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