December 8, John Lennon day

The clock radio woke us, and the first sound that came over it was an announcer’s voice: “We’ll have more about the murder of John Lennon after this.”

We sat bolt upright in bed. Had we heard correctly? It had come to us at the tail end of sleep, maybe he had really said some other name, or not the word “murder.”

But when the commercial was over, we learned that it was true. Then we remembered hearing an unusual storm of sirens when we’d gone to bed around midnight, sirens which we now learned had been a couple of miles north of us....

We went to a law students’ party, and one guy, a student’s husband, ... told us that he and his wife lived on the Upper West Side and had been out walking at the time of the murder, just a couple of blocks away, and had heard the horrible sirens, and without knowing anything about what they were for, he had suddenly begun to cry as he walked home.

That's an excerpt from my dad's account — you can read the whole thing here.

And here's my mom's version — posted a few hours later, before either of them had seen the other's post.

(Notice my cameo appearance in the first paragraph of my dad's post and the last paragraph of my mom's post.)