Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

Forty-one years ago today John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then President of the United States, was shot to death in Dallas, TX. Anybody who was a teenager or older at the time remembers exactly where he or she was when the news broke.

I was walking to my next class at Loyola University of Chicago when my boyfriend came running up, a look of disbelief on his face. “Have you heard?” he said. “The President’s been shot. He’s in the emergency room of a hospital in Dallas.”

In the ten minutes between classes, everything changed. By the time I arrived at my next class, a voice came over the public address system to announce that Kennedy was dead. In the following days, the nation would learn that Lee Harvey Oswald bore the responsibility. But for those few moments, it was the unthinkable.

The nation and I spent the next four days in front of our television sets as the President’s body was brought back to Washington to lie in state before a funeral and burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The widow, the dignitaries, little John-John saluting his father’s casket, the riderless horse, the military salute: I remember it all as if it were yesterday.