Dave Lister Recollection Sparks JFK Memory

I’ve been researching the Dave Lister candidacy and I was impressed with this piece - linked below - on his website called the Wiener-Wrap Tribute for the 40th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. It's the little details that make such a vivid recounting of a childhood time. It also jarred memories of that morning for me, a 9-year-old kid in Saudi Arabia:
The phone rang during the night with the news, and it happened to be a morning when I was supposed to be an altar boy. There was no church per se in Dhahran. The main masses took place on an elevated stage in the town movie theater. Behind the altar, there was a huge red curtain and behind it, was the movie screen. These masses were on Friday which was the Arabian version of Sunday.
During the workweek, the priest would hold morning mass in a little chapel that was built onto his house. Of course, at the time I hated getting up so early, when it was still dark, but I look back now to walking with my Dad over to the weekday masses, as a really fond memory. The desert sky in that early morning hour had deep spirits of its own. On the walk this time he told me that the phone call was about what had happened in Dallas. The President had been killed. What gets me, looking back, was how far-off America was to me then. Sure, we visited every 2 years but that was a long time for a 9-year-old kid. The United States might as well have been a mythical place that we visited once a century.
When my father and I got to the chapel, I saw a woman who I had seen many times, and she was crying. An adult crying? Right then I understood how serious this was. My father had kept his feelings concealed on the walk, explaining the situation to me in a straightforward, almost comforting way, but that’s how he was.
The altar boys - there was probably just two of us for the weekday service - and the priest entered from this little room on the side. That morning the priest put on a black robe and said it was a Black Mass. Then he asked us if we knew why. I have to confess that I didn’t respond. Maybe it was just the shock of seeing how shook up everyone was, or maybe it was the early hour, but I remember thinking, “This must have something to do with what my father told me.” Still, in the shy world of a 9-year-old I did not speak. The priest told us, and we went out and did the mass. By the time we got out there more adults were crying and I knew something very, very bad had happened in the far-off place called America.
The Weiner Wrap Tribute