Imagine

I admit, I've missed commenting on a number of significant events and dates and anniversaries lately (and shame on me for doing so): Rosa Parks' death, the 50th anniversary of her society-changing refusal to move to the back of the bus, AIDS Awareness Day, yesterday's 61st anniversary of Pearl Harbor... but today marks an anniversary that I will always remember feeling viscerally: the first time I really cried over the death of a celebrity, of someone whom I'd never met (and never would or will get a chance to meet), but who had touched me deeply and been a part of my life for nearly as long as I can recall. I was still living in Pomona when I first heard the news, watching Monday Night Football with a friend, Will, and my then-girlfriend, now-wife (the oft-referred-to here Mrs. Generik), and I remember my jaw dropping, my heart sinking, my hands rising involuntarily to my mouth as I muttered, "No. No. No. No." when Howard Cosell announced that "John Lennon has been shot."

It's not as if I was a stranger to death, or even to the deaths of heroes of my generation. I vividly remember John F. Kennedy being assassinated when I was 7, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy being shot when I was 12, and far too many other killings between and since. But there was something that hit me like almost nothing else ever had -- nothing since my uncle's death in Vietnam in 1972 -- when I learned that John Lennon had been killed 25 years ago in New York City. I still have a hard time listening to his voice without remembering the shock and sadness that I felt on that evening in 1980 when I learned that he was gone. I doubt that I'll ever really get over it.

Instant Karma's gonna get you,
Gonna knock you right in the head.
Better get yourself together, darlin',
Pretty soon you're gonna be dead...

But we all shine on,
Like the moon, and the stars, and the sun...
Yeah, we all shine on,
On and on, on and on...

On and on, John. On and on.