"A working-class hero is something to be..."

I just read that Thursday will be twenty-five years since John Lennon's murder. I remember that dark, cold morning: December 8, 1980... I was - what? 14 years old, wow.

I woke up and turned on WMMR, and they were playing only John Lennon and Beatles tunes. The DJ came on and told me the news, and I remember distinctly the feeling of my whole world crashing down. I had just started getting into old Beatles, mostly the pre-Beatlemania stuff, but it wasn't like I was a Beatles freak. However, the news just devastated me, as it obviously did people who were a lot older than me. When the DJ reported that he was killed, he used the word "assassinated," which was weird 'cause I thought they just said that about Presidents and Kings, not rock stars...

I was totally freaked out, and I went into the kitchen and asking my mom, "Did you hear?" It was only then that I started to cry. I pulled it together in time for school, and in my History of Rock class (yes, my high school did have that as an elective) this girl Lynn Gallo asked me if I cried. I told her no, of course... didn't want her to think I was a pussy. All I really remember about the rest of that day was that I was the only person who was at all affected. I felt kind of the same way on September 11 in Hawai'i, when it seemed like I was the only person walking around like something deep and profound had broken in the world.

I just soaked up all the Lennon stuff on the radio and TV. I taped all 8 or whatever hours of the Andy Peebles BBC Lennon interviews off the radio and played them over and over again, in bed with my huge old headphones plugged into my Panasonic tape recorder, listening to John and Yoko talking about world peace. I've always had it in my head that his murder was my "radicalising event" in the way that old hippies had the assassination of JFK. When I look back on it now, though, I'm struck by how much Lennon's philosophy affected the development of my outlook on the world. I definitely became a leftist that day... however, I hadn't realised until just now that I also became a Buddhist on that day, though I didn't act on it until much later.

I've changed so much - and yet really so little - in the quarter century that passed since then. I think what I mean is that I tried at different points in my life to be someone different - doing drugs in my teens, joining a commune in my 20s - only to come back to the essential core which is who I was way back then. At this late date in my life - nearing 40!!! - I feel more like that long-ago teenager than I have in all the intervening years. It seems really important to hold faith with that dumb idealistic kid.