It was early Tuesday morning, December 9. I was 9 years old and living on 30th Terrace in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. I must have been eating my breakfast and getting ready for school. My memory of this day has all the clarity of a dream, except for one element:
I still can recall watching the Today show and seeing the live footage of people gathered near Central Park to mourn the passing of John Lennon. He’d been shot the night before and pronounced dead just after 11 p.m.
Mom wasn’t crying, but I could sense that her world, if only for a little while, had just become a little bit grayer.
Even at my young age, I was a Beatles fan. At my insistence in 1978, Mom took me to see Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Movie. It’s probably an awful film, but as a child who played that record over and over on 8-track, I loved it.
So I was well aware who John Lennon was and why his passing could bring so many to tears. He was a Beatle. And I loved the Beatles. I would walk around one of the handful of apartment complexes I lived in singing “Let It Be.” I barely knew any words to “Good Morning, Good Morning,” but I would sing it anyway, much to Mom’s aggravation.
Not long after that day, I was walking in the Lauderdale Lakes Mall and saw a poster of John Lennon. “1940-1980,” it read. I did the math in my head, and it frightened me.
A cynic might say that poster was just cashing in on a man’s death, turning him into an icon to purchase and hang on a wall. But that’s only partly true. Because I also think that image and the countless tributes written in the wake of Lennon’s death are how we keep his memory alive, how we comfort ourselves while knowing that we’ve lost someone who made us happy, and how we’ve lost everything he would ever give us.
Odd then, that the most touching tribute has nothing to do with our relationship to John. It was written by his mate, Paul.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2008.