Everyone remembers where they were when they heard.....

....Captain America had been assassinated! For me, it was a day I'll never forget. At my favorite Mexican restaurant, pre-recorded mariachis were playing over a TV mounted high in a back corner above the bar. I was munching chips and soaking up suds when a cook hastened from the kitchen.

Turning the TV to CNN and raising its volume to a level now challenging the mariachis "El Milagro de Tus Ojos," I noticed the cook's reddened eyes. She was crying. Was it something she'd heard on the television or onions she had been dicing for the enchiladas? I got the idea we were about to find out.

I couldn't believe when next I heard the words uttered from the stunned lips of CNN's Kyra Phillips: "It's official, Captain America, ageless defender of our American way of life was officially pronounced dead at 12:51 EDT, gunned down on the steps outside a New York federal courthouse. A victim of an assassin's bullet."

Reaching for my cerveza, I knocked my festive Noche Buena into the guacamole. The room was suddenly filled with the sounds of dropping forks and gasping patrons throughout the restaurant.

No doubt, none of us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing the moment we heard the news. I know for me, I'll remember forever that mole sabroso.

Courtesy of Marvel Entertainment, Inc.

Captain America on his way to his final rest, as ushered there by his solemn
pall bearers (to include Iron Man, the Black Panther, Ben Grim and Ms. Marvel).

And who can forget the legacy left us by our all-American hero, like this World War II photo where he was about to surprise der Führer with a knuckle nose sandwich?


Remarkably, a reporter known only as "Barb" from a small underground paper in Berkeley interviewed Mrs. America shortly after her husband's funeral. It was then his widow revealed the sad truth.

"'Cap' would never have fallen into the assassin's ambush if he had cared. But the sad truth is, Cappy really died several years ago when he lost his zeal for living, for defending all he believed America to be. Everything good, honorable. A shining beacon to a gloomy world."

"He never dreamed a nation for which he had given so much, had defended with his life, would become a symbol of oppression raining terror and hated upon the world. He died a broken, despondent man!" she sobbed almost inaudibly into the coffin's American flag she had been presented just moments earlier.

Plans are under way for Mrs. America to attend a White House ceremony later this month where she will receive a Medal of Freedom in honor of her late husband's heroics from an appreciative president Bush.