In VistaVision that summer, we first glimpsed
evil in the skies when Melanie Daniels, gliding
across Bodega Bay in a rented motorboat —
attractive, flirtatious, confident ”“ was suddenly
attacked by a gull, a gash to the head
right there smack in middle of the day,
bright and blue.
Reacting, she touched the wound, saw blood
and, as disbelief turned down the corners of her mouth,
we felt something very awful and out of our control
was really going to happen.
And it did, just before Thanksgiving, this time
in an eight-millimeter home movie strip when
President Kennedy, drifting in a motorcade
through downtown Dallas ”“ handsome, aglow, confident —
was suddenly shot, the very first bullet clear through his neck
right there smack in the middle of the day,
bright and blue.
Reacting, he clutched his throat and, as disbelief
turned down the corners of his mouth, we closed our eyes
afraid to look just like in the movies knowing what the next bullet,
seconds away, would do.
It hasn”™t been the same since devil”™s wings
filled the skies. Like Hitchcock”™s survivors, we drive
down an endlessly abandoned road where cold-blooded
eyes follow our fearful journey, as if we are all moving targets.
(A note from Georgette Gouveia: I”™ve worked with publicist-freelance writer Frank Pagani on many stories, but it”™s only in recent years that I”™ve discovered he”™s also a fine poet, often writing on topics of the day. This year marks the 60thanniversary of Alfred Hitchcock”™s movie “The Birds” and of President John F. Kennedy”™s assassination. Pagani finds a different kind of menace in each, reminding us that part of the beauty of art is that it”™s not real: )
