Soapbox

Quick time check- what happened 27 years ago today?
John Lennon was shot at the Dakota in New York City.

27 years? Now I feel really old. I remember that night very well. I was upstairs in our house on Shannon Ave- it was winter break my senior year in college. My Dad came in and told us that he’d just heard on the TV that John Lennon had been shot. Becky didn’t believe him- I mean, who would shoot John Lennon, for goodness’ sake? And why? What possible reason could there be for wanting to silence him?

Fame, as it turned out: the desire to be someone that people will notice. Kill a famous person, BE a famous person. And in America, everybody wants to be famous, don’t they? It’s the American dream.

Becky, Julia (my former roommate, who was staying with us that break) and I hurried downstairs and turned on the TV. After the 11:00 news they ran a hastily put together special with all the details that were then known plus retrospective of Lennon’s life and career… and we watched, feeling numb.
In a desire- a need to observe some sort of ritual to mark this passing, Becky and I made black arm bands and covered the mirror in our room. I still have a photo of the two of us, arms around each other, in our nightgowns and arm bands, taken that night.

It seemed at the time that such an event should change something, somehow- but time has just waltzed on. A few people wrote songs about him, and they built him a cool little park in New York City. Yoko Ono is building a tower of light in Iceland, the "Imagine" tower, to be a symbol for peace, which is pretty artsy, and very nice. but…. Of course now I am wise enough to know that the loss of a life, no matter how bright the light, doesn’t really change much at all. The world keeps going, and often doesn’t even seem to notice. When you’re young, you want to believe that some people are too big to be just snuffed out by some random, weird fate. Lennon was one of them.
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