...And now I can't remember exactly why it was that I was home from school that day. It wasn't a weekend. It may actually not have been a coincidence: there were strange things afoot at school, Secret Service guys crawling all over the building, because Reagan had been scheduled to make a big photo-op visit to the school sometime in the next few days (it was a science-and-tech magnet school in the DC area, and I think the whole thing was supposed to dovetail somehow with Christa McAuliffe being in orbit). When the shuttle blew up the visit got rescheduled for a couple of weeks later, we watched him via satellite at the memorial service instead, and the content of his address when he did visit changed to "our astronauts shall not have died in vain" etc. etc.