And this is not a short-term vs. long-term middle-age memory clash. Rather, it's a coping mechanism, the result of repetition on the mind, or the "weariness of again" as my friend Jeane so wisely put it. It's what allows us to say gloomily, "Oh no not again!" after the worst mass murder in our country occurs. And then, just like that, busy on with our lives. But gloom lodges in.

I do remember turning in with a sense of fear that could knock me down. And waking the next morning with a kink in my neck, a stiffening of which I've not experienced before.

I should have cried. Crying is the perfect relief for a woman like me. But I couldn't. I was too busy stowing my dread. In my neck, apparently, where it wound its way like a plumber's snake into my second cervical vertebra, my Spa Noir masseuse surmised. "Of course," I said, trying to pretend I knew the scientific name of my neck bone. "So, um, can you fix it?"

And slowly, under the weight of her thumbs and palms, what I feared was a permanent pain in my neck, eased.

But it won't go away completely. It's my body's way of dealing with fed-up-ness. That's what I think. Because every time I think about how a disturbed young man can still walk into a gun shop and buy an automatic pistol, I feel my neck stiffen tighter.

If we can't rewrite our laws so that perceptive children can't so easily mimic their leaders-both presidential and ones they really care about, the ones on their video screens-and remedy their aggressions with gunfire, what, really, is the point?

And don't interject here with any time-worn Americanisms about our rights to bear arms or patriotic slogans invented to keep us from thinking for ourselves. Okay? Just don't go there.

I think of all this because, just yesterday on the bus, I heard a man say where he'd been when Kennedy was shot, back when murder by gunfire could silence the flow of American life.

He made me remember where I was that day-in the hallway of my grade school, outside of Mrs. Adam's room, afraid to go in because I'd slept late and missed the bus. The janitor-sorry, we didn't say custodian in the sixties-told me the news. He had a broom in his hands. The kind with a mop head as wide as the hallway.

I had another memory blackout right after the Amish killings; when, on that evening I sat stunned in front of my TV, knowing that viewing the images once is enough, more than enough. Still, I couldn't pull myself away. But I can't remember where I was when I first heard the news. Or who told me.

Though here in Belltown, just last year, I was walking on Third Avenue when the slain women were carried out of the Jewish Federation office on stretchers. That is something one never forgets. Unless you live in a war-zone; where, I suspect, even first-hand accounts are so commonplace that one might need to forget, even before the witnessing is complete. In order to cope.

I'm pretty sure that last sentence, I am sorry to say, is my next neck kink. There are so many little sensations tightening on so many little nerves.