I sleep with the radio on. Always have. It isn’t loud, in fact it’s barely audible. Some nights I wake during the night, slowly float up into consciousness for a moment, just to roll over and look at the stars out the windows, and then sink back in to sleep. Just that moment of barely awake, I might hear the radio if I listened. But it would never wake me. Too quiet.
Yet it proves a comfort, deep seeded I guess, because I have had a radio by the bed for as long as I can remember.
My earliest memories of radio-bed are without station loyalty. I roamed the dial, AM Dial, from the mid five fifties all the way through the upper sixteen hundreds, stopping on any thing that was clear whether music played on request for truck drivers out on the highways or soft sounds of early fifties crooners or news. I roamed from WCKY to WOWO to WABC toWBT to WSB.
It was news I heard on the dark morning hours before the last day of junior high. Didn’t matter which station I was tuned to; they all became news stations telling the east coast as it woke that Robert Kennedy had been shot.
Since it was the last day of school there was no work, no real class work. Teachers took roll and then everyone just visited and said good bye for the summer, and before noon we all went home. In that particular Piedmont-rural junior high I do not remember there being any talk of the senator’s assassination and his cling to life.
The eighth grade of E. M. Holt School was immune that day from the gravity of the world’s events. It was the last day of school and the last day for that school; next year we’d all be going to high school. For a generation, students from Holt moved on to Southern High School, but redistricting had shifted school assignment boundaries and now half of the class would be assigned to Graham...Southern’s rival. On the last day of school the assignments still had not been finalized, so the goodbyes were mostly “I promise to be your fiend no matter what happens.” There was a sense of impending siege and battle and earnest commitments that no rivalry would ever come between us. But not me. I was leaving for good.
For eight years, since the first grade, since John Kennedy stood bear headed in the cold, I had caught the school bus, the same school bus - number seventeen, at the end of my drive, ridden the same six mile route to school, progressed through elementary and junior high at the expected pace, in the same school, the same school buildings, then ridden the bus back to my driveway.
Which high school I was assigned to didn’t matter because we were moving away that same day. So when I said goodbye at school that morning, I had said goodbye to people I had seen every day for a long time and that I would never see again.
When I got home a tractor trailer was backed up to the carport with a ramp sloping from the trailer doors to the kitchen door. Movers had the house half empty, and by the time RFK died the following morning, my family and all its processions had left the Piedmont and were deep into the Blue Ridge.