In the passing car 26 years ahead
At fourteen years old I woke one morning to find that John Lennon had been shot to death the night before. While I slept he walked up to the doorway to the Dakota apartment building where he lived and was shot in the chest by a man named Mark David Chapman. His fortieth birthday had only been two months previous.
For a teenager who had only really just gotten into The Beatles and Lennon's solo music this was a shock. Very few dates come to mind as being that much of a shock in my life. While for an earlier generation the assasinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luthor King jr. were all great moments of singular tragedy, bookmarks in the timestream that loomed large over their lives, this would be the first for my generation. To come would be the destruction of a space shuttle, the collapse of the twin towers and then yet another space shuttle burning up in the atmosphere.
It struck me that sometime in the last couple weeks I passed the age John Lennon was when he died. That I am now moving forward, in my own personal time, into an age that he never knew. I find that a little disquieting here at the dog's end of the year.
For a teenager who had only really just gotten into The Beatles and Lennon's solo music this was a shock. Very few dates come to mind as being that much of a shock in my life. While for an earlier generation the assasinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luthor King jr. were all great moments of singular tragedy, bookmarks in the timestream that loomed large over their lives, this would be the first for my generation. To come would be the destruction of a space shuttle, the collapse of the twin towers and then yet another space shuttle burning up in the atmosphere.
It struck me that sometime in the last couple weeks I passed the age John Lennon was when he died. That I am now moving forward, in my own personal time, into an age that he never knew. I find that a little disquieting here at the dog's end of the year.