Most people in my generation remember where they were. My daughter happened to be home from school with a bad cold, and watched CNN all day on Jan 28, 1986. She told me the next morning that her dreams were filled with repetitive images of the Challenger exploding.

I was in the front seat of my car on Sept 11, 2001. My husband was giving me a ride to work, I don't recall why I wasn't on my usual bus. We heard NPR's Carl Kassel report that a small plane had crashed into one of the buildings of the World Trade Center. By the time I got upstairs to the office, my boss was on the phone, telling us that he was closing the office and we should all leave for home as quickly as we could. I don't recall exactly how I did that - my husband had no cell phone and he was going to be out running errands. But somehow, I managed to reach him and we spent the rest of the day in shock with the rest of the country.

But somehow, as horrific as those other two days were, I recall Nov 22, 1963 with more pain and grief. I was a senior at the University of Iowa. Lunch was just ending and as I walked back to my room in the dormitory, one of my good friends went running past me, pulling at the apron of her waitress uniform and not responding to my query: "What's wrong? Are you all right?"

In my room, I was looking for some information I needed to take with me when I met one of my professors later that afternoon, when someone in the hallway shouted: "Turn on the radio! Kennedy has been shot!" My roommate returned from lunch and the two of us listened to the disjointed jumble of information. The whole event seemed unimaginable.

As the weekend went on, along with most of my friends, I wanted to be with people I knew and cared about. My boyfriend, good friends on campus. I spent a lot of time crowded into the small dorm room of one of my friends, who had a small TV set in her room. It was an unusual accessory for a college student in 1963. I watched the funeral and various processions in that small room. Packed in like the proverbial sardines, most of us wept softly, and eventually co operated to tell one woman present to "shut up" when she persisted in asking what Mrs Kennedy was wearing.

I went to church that Sunday - I don't recall anything about the service except that I was comforted being in the presence of a large group of people, all presumably grieving like I was.

Then I went home for Thanksgiving. I expected to be wrapped in the same comforting warmth I had found over and over again on campus. It didn't happen. My father, especially, had a very pedantic summary of the import of Kennedy's death which focused on the loss to the country of what sort of elder statesman Kennedy would have been.

With the passage of time, I can see that my father was never comfortable with openly expressed deep emotion, and most likely had no words of comfort to offer his daughter so he retreated into intellectual analysis.

I'm pretty sure it was 25 years later, in 1988, when just as this week, television was filled with one sort of retrospective after another. I sat in the den of my home weeping, in start contrast to the behavior my father deemed acceptable in our home in 1963. Mr Woodstock came to sit beside me for a few minutes, and stroked my hair.

I would be interested in hearing from my regular followers about your memories of Nov 22 1963.