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The weather has not quite turned to winter, but the southbound fronts are blowing through more often, lasting longer. After Halloween, in the cool bubble of suspension before the rush of Thanksgiving and Christmas, we wait, biding our days in the classroom. My classroom is not very big -- the 20-some kids in the room fill it to the corners. I am in 5^th grade but we 5^th graders are so few in number that we share a classroom with a larger tribe of 4th graders and half my day is spent reading, while the teacher works with the other grade.

Sometimes she lets me teach the 4th graders. I'm the best in the class at reading and history and the second-best at math, behind the little red-haired girl whose attention I yearn for. I play basketball badly in the ancient gymnasium, sometimes against kids almost twice my age.

In November 1963, not everyone in Texas loves the President.

Though my parents and everyone they know, my legion of aunts and uncles and adult cousins, all vote Democrat, there is widespread distrust of John Kennedy -- his accent, his religion, his lifestyle, and especially his views on Negroes. But his trip to Dallas is appreciated and everyone does love Lyndon Johnson.

I know John Kennedy from comic books, especially from Mad, where he is a favorite target of mild satire. But I also know him from Life, from newsreels, from Vaughn Meader's First Family comedy records ("Well, is Bobby home?"), and from the White House tour on TV. My parents think he is a good President.

Lunch at my country school is more like a kitchen than a cafeteria. The food is better in Lone Oak, more substantial and less likely to be canned spaghetti than in Corpus Christi.

One afternoon, I am full and sleepy with lunch, settling into Huckleberry Finn, when the assistant principal slips into our classroom, very grave but visibly excited.

He tells us that the President has been shot. The Governor too, and maybe the Vice President, and then he goes away. The room grows very quiet and poor old Mrs. Dodd struggles to talk to us about what has happened.

I imagine the shooting as a comic book panel, vivid and real, in the style of Jack Sparling's Brain Boy, the most political comic I read. I envision the President rising up in his convertible limo, convulsing like a shot soldier.

Soon, the assistant principal comes back to tell us that John Kennedy is dead and Lyndon Johnson is President.

I suggest aloud that maybe Texas will benefit from a Texan being President. Teachers laugh sweetly about my precocious pragmatism for days afterward, little dreaming that my real teachers are comic books and Mad magazine.

When I go home, the mood is very solemn and the TV chatters constantly. Though it is Friday, there will be no Twilight Zone tonight.

My father tells a story at the dinner table.

Dad hears the awful news about the assassination while he is making a noontime appliance delivery. Later, when he pulls up at the loading dock behind the store where he works, he asks a co-worker, "Did you hear Kennedy got shot?"

And the man answers, "Good enough for the N*** lover."

Dad thinks the man might have not really believed Kennedy was shot -- that his ugly words are a quickly regretted joke. He gives the man the benefit of the doubt.

The weekend unfolds like an anxious dream, the TV never pausing, the sense of urgent crisis unending. I flee the house to play in the fields. There is a day of mourning declared and I will not go to school on Monday. My cousin and I and our friends are restless and a little terrified. We wander in the fields, staying away from our homes and the televisions as long as we can, all day Saturday into the evening and out of the house again first thing Sunday.

Sunday afternoon, I come home breathless and dirty to find my parents inarticulate with shock.

They tell me Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who shot the President, has himself been shot, live on television. I have trouble grasping the situation.

So does everyone else. For the first time in my life, grown-ups are as clueless as kids.

Monday is a day of funereal solemnity and we all go back to work and school on Tuesday. The sense of crisis passes into somber holiday. North wind blows snow across the highway and we are in winter.

On the radio, The Singing Nun cheerfully and endlessly chirps about Dominique raising hymns to God.

On Thanksgiving, the extended clan of men in my family goes hunting, uncles and cousins tramping through the woods. We kill a lot of squirrels and I prove to be a pretty good shot.

Weeks later, I buy Fantastic Four 24 in Greenville and I realize with sick horror that I have missed an issue of the World's Greatest Comic Magazine, the first I have missed since the second issue, a fifth of a lifetime ago.

The loss seems trivial in the new world, but I am resolute.

For the first time, I put keys to paper and type a letter to a comic book company. I write to Marvel and plead. I ask them if it is possible to order FF23 and -- while I'm at is, ask if I can order Sgt Fury 5, which I have also missed, and -- pushing my luck -- if I can also possibly get copies of Sgt Fury 1 and 2.

I wait.

And a few weeks later, I receive a blue postcard, part of it printed, giving me the cost for back issues, 20 cents and postage, and a handwritten note at the bottom (Flo?) that says "Sorry, no number 1s." I scrape my pennies together and order FF23 and Sgt Fury 5.

And I wait.

The envelope arrives weeks later, early in the new year, big and crisp and flat, with two perfect comic books inside.

They smell different, infused with the very aura of the Marvel offices.

By the time I read this gift from the gods, I have built FF23 way beyond any possible hope of realization. Hints in letters pages and issues from the subsequent months have already told me the villain in this comic is Dr Doom, so I am expecting the best of tales. And, to my disappointment, it's not that good an issue, especially compared to the Doom that has come most recently before it -- in FF 16-17 and Spiderman 5.

My dinosaur gene is stimulated by the opening sequence with a baby Trachodon, like an escapee from a Charles Knight painting, running loose in the Baxter Building, but the tension among the team seems a little tired by now, a device we have seen repeated in too many issues. Likewise, Doom's recruitment of three agents is Comic Book 101, creating a nemesis for each of the FF, aiming at their perceived weaknesses. The expansion of Yancy Street is especially appealing, but the rest of the plot seems a little formulaic and, as he sometimes is, Doom is almost generic, a menace without particular distinction. The character still has not risen to the promise of his concept. So ultimately I am a little disappointed in FF23 (especially compared to FF25 which is the current issue), but my collection is once again complete and I now have an artifact from the Olympus on Madison Avenue where the gods live.

Sgt Fury 5 reinforces my love of the title. No other comic, not even the FF, is as vividly drawn. I miss some of the impact of SF5 by reading it months later, since much of the story's force comes from the lingering sorrow over Junior's loss in #4, and by the time I read SF5, that memory has faded. But the story is still powerful and the introduction of Baron Strucker moves Fury a step closer to the super-hero comics by giving the Sarge an arch-foe. The plot is familiar -- the irresistible challenge to Fury's pride in the midst of his anger and grief -- but the outcome is unexpected. Fury's loss to Strucker and his demotion are shocking and powerful, even if they are overcome in the end, and the sheer exuberance of Kirby's art is astonishing.

One effect of this month of missing comics is that -- for me -- the issues that were distributed in that dark month become quest objects for me. For years afterward, the discovery of one of these treasures is a breathtaking event, a little recovery of the vanished past.

Spiderman 9 I find years later in a used book store called Bill's in Corpus Christi, the very last comic I miss in that blighted month, and I am grateful finally to be reading a story I have come to regard as almost legendary in its evasiveness. Like FF23, by the time I read ASM9, the issue has been eclipsed by later, better issues. Still, reading a Ditko story I have not seen before is an incredible treat and even if the story is told by the numbers, the art and script are enormously fun. Electro, with his jagged lines and asymmetrical mask, reminds me of Reddy Kilowatt and his powers appeal powerfully to a pre-teen, the projection of a real, identifiable force -- electricity -- out of his body. The interplay between Peter and Jameson is, as always, amusing, and, even more than in early issues, the real story, the continuity, happens when Spiderman is out of costume. On the whole, the issue is another good one, further establishing Spiderman as the street level character in the Marvel Universe, grounded in the believable, accessible and as close to real as a comic book character can be.

As November 1963 becomes December, the whole world is different. We move on toward Christmas. There is a sense -- at least in my household -- of hunkering down, waiting for deep winter.

Or maybe for the spring that will follow.

Dominique -nique -nique s'en allait tout simplement,

Routier, pauvre et chantant.

En tous chemins, en tous lieux,

Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu,

Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu

-Jeanine Deckers, The Singing Nun