Do you remember where you were 25 years ago today? December 8, 1980, NYC, in front of the Dakota apartment building, John Lennon was shot and killed.
I remember that I was in our family room, sitting in my dad’s recliner. He had already gone to bed. I can’t remember which channel I was watching, but I remember crying and crying – I was only 13.
I have 2 John Lennon posters in my classroom with words “All you need is love” next to them. During my brothers senior year, we painted the words to “Imagine” on his car – we stayed up late to finish.
On this day, I proudly proclaim that I am a dreamer. Won’t all you dreamers out there join me and share your dreams, memories, and show the world that I am not the only one.
I was making cookies (an extremely rare event — I’m not sure I’ve done it since) when the DJ broke into a song to say that there was a report that he had been shot.
The next half hour or hour or so was a horrible time with more and more definite updates.
My x was a law student and studying for finals that night. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a law student studying for finals? But they aren’t people you want to talk to except in an emergency. Was this an emergency?
It felt like it to me.
The Dakota
The Imagine Mosaic
I was in 8th grade, getting ready for school, and heard it on the news before I went to catch the bus.
Thanks for the pictures Katie. I have no idea how do import a picture from another site.
These really added to the diary.
Did your ex think that this was an emergency?
Ahhh. Well, he was massively bi-polar (when it was still called manic-depression) with an emphasis on the depressive end.
No, it wasn’t an emergency — but it was an excuse to stop studying and go to a bar (which was all my fault). And I happen to know that if I hadn’t told him then THAT would have been all my fault as well.
The worst of all possible worlds is living with a bi-polar law student.
Yikes, I guess I’m still a lot more resentful of those years than I realized. I didn’t mean to be offense. I meant bi-polar evil law students. If you’re not evil, I don’t mean you at all.
No offense taken. I’m completely stable, when the voices in my head shut up.
Well, I know that a lot of people struggle with bi-polar issues to some degree or other. And I just want to be perfectly clear that he was evil, with or without bi-polar issues. And, I’m sure that the evilness was the source of most of our problems. Of course his being bi-polar didn’t help at all.
OMG, were we married to the same guy? 🙂
Maybe. He’s remarried at least twice since our divorce. (wouldn’t that be weird?)
just the other day I was thinking, “use your inside the head voice”.
inside or outside your head?
Thanks for your appreciation of the photo. It was very important for me to get that picture, even though it was a pretty bad day for photography, it was the only chance I had.
I have a free account at photobucket.com where it’s pretty easy to upload photos from my computer, then they make it very easy to cut and paste what you need to put in a comment to create the link.
I think the free account has plenty of space — I’m not close to filling it up after 6 months.
my sister and her boyfriend (now husband) visiting. Too hard to describe.
Vaguely….it was a little over a month before I go sober. I heard the news and started binge drinking and crying for three days. Wow, hadn’t thought about that in a long time.
Sorry to stir up bad memories aloha.
Oh Teacher, no need to apologise. One must be able to face their past in order to have a future. I have no problem talking about my past and my alcoholism. It is part of who I am.
I was sweet 16 turning 31. Just got home from working as a waitress, heard it on the tv. Decided I’ve already been through this all-night wake for Bobby Kennedy, can’t bear to do it again for John. I’ll think about it tomorrow.
Scarlett
My memory is not so much about the day John was killed. But a couple of years later. You see, as I’ve probably said already too many times here, I grew up mostly in East Texas in a fundamentalist right wing family. Of course John’s “We’re more popular than Jesus” remark were fighting words in my world. So I was taught to see him as a threat. Of course the song “Imagine” was also considered dangerous.
Then one day in the early 80’s I was running around a lake in Mpls. listening to the radio and they played the song. By this time I was in the process of rejecting everything I had been taught growing up. I listened to the song with new ears for the first time. And had to stop running and just cried at the beauty of what he was saying. I had several moments like that during my re-birthing process – but that one stands out. I still cry when I hear it.
Thank you for sharing this story. It gave me goose bumps.
I was in South America. I felt so alone with my grief. Even though people loved his music there, it just wasn’t the same. It wasn’t their native tongue.
On new years eve,they make “effigies” and then burn them at midnight. There was an effigy of three Beatles and a coffin. It was very moving and I was glad some others were so moved to do that.
The effigies they burned were to honor people?
I was 14 and away at boarding school. I remember it was shocking news. But what really stands out in my mind was I asked my dad to pick a song for us to dance to at my wedding reception. Not being one for tradition, he picked Imagine. I remember holding dad really tight and silently crying as I listened to the words.
I just about cried when I read this. What an amazing song selection by your dad.
yes
i was at murray state university in western kentucky…the literal bowels of the earth….the bible belt of hatred….going thru a total culture shock…ronald reagan had just been elected president….i was missing the bruce springsteen concert back in philly ….we were putting christmas decorations up on our dorm floor…we were the bad girls at the end of the hall….my suite mate was a dyke and i was asked not to invite my black male friends to my room…some of these girls had never seen a bl;ack person in the flesh before….the parents of the white girls didnt like having those dangerous black guys in the same building their daughters slept in….someone came out in the hall and announced john lennon was just killed….someone else came out and asked who is john lennon…..thats when i knew we were doomed….they let stupid people vote and they voted for reagan.
that was the first time i dropped acid….my lesbian suite mate and i went for a walk and we found some fresh concrete….we wrote in it with a stick….”I thought that love would save the world.” John Lennon…..someone gave me something to eat with tuna in it and it exploded in my mouth….i have not eaten tuna since….i saw a dog turn into a cat then back into a dog….we sat on the roof of the dorm for a while and she thought about jumping off….that wasnt the last time she would do that.
Somerwhere, I am sure that John is smiling at this story.
The day before my 3rd birthday. I don’t remember.
But several months ago I was riding in the car with my friend, and we were listening to the Beatles, and singing along; and her four-year-old daughter was singing along, too, and I realized: this wasn’t the music of my generation. It was my parents. Yet it’s ours now too, because we heard it growing up, we loved it, we listen to it still. And now a third generation will grow up loving the music of the Beatles.
That’s really something else, isn’t it?
Recently, I was driving Andrew and listening to a Beatles CD. When “Let It Be” finished, he cried until I played it again.
.
LEAVE Iraq to the Iraqis
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
less about this post in specific:
http://www.donorschoose.org/
Teachers submit spending proposals and after a selection process, random internet surfers come by and drop money on the projects they like!
Might help your Title I colleagues…
Never apologize for pointing out free money to a teacher.
I came home from an awful meeting I’d attended because I’d just moved to a new city and had a new job and wanted to make a good impression. There was a phone message from my sister-in-law and when I called her she told me the news. For the next three or four days I felt so sad and alone, crying on the bus on the way home from work. I always remember John.
A clear recollection: Broadway & Canal St near Chinatown, lower Manhattan, walking home from a local bar to the loft shared with a number of musicians, the air still & moist, not too cold for December. Calls rang out in the street; the news traveled between mobile shadows; faces emerged from the general darkness, exchanged the information quickly & moved on, like bees. Then the fearful sense of tragedy in the air was palpable. The air grew heavier.
At home, we switched on the radio for confirmation. The most tender-hearted of my musical room-mates, the guitarist, spent the night in his room with his cat, weeping.
Personally, having been born in 1960, some of my earliest musical consciousness involved the Beatles; I’ve heard the songs of Lennon/McCartney throughout my life. John Lennon existed for me as does the perpetual change of seasons, the colors of the rainbow; his creativity was so great as to expand his individual being into common consciousness. Therefore, what remains is to celebrate the beauty & love his creative gifts lent our lives; Lennon himself passed through existence as we all do, in his fated time.
I was 10 and I cried like I lost my only brother. Words I live by:
People say I’m crazy doing what I’m doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin
When I say that I’m o.k. well they look at me kind of strange
Surely you’re not happy now you no longer play the game
People say I’m lazy dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I’m doing fine watching shadows on the wall
Don’t you miss the big time boy you’re no longer on the ball
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
Ah, people asking questions lost in confusion
Well I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I’ve lost my mind
I tell them there’s no hurry
I’m just sitting here doing time
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go…
to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of john lennon, we refer you back to the partyparty’s rendition of awol singing “imagine.”
[ed. note: since we last linked you to rx’s wonderful remix of this song, the website, audiostreet.net, has begun requiring registration. however, it’s easy to register, and quite worth it, if only just to hear awol’s own words sing lennon’s thoughts (with some of lou reed thrown in, don’t ask us how or why, but it works).]
I was at home watching something on the tele. When the news broke into the program I felt that deep, deep saddness I had felt far too many times before in my life. Of course I cried and I asked over and over again the unanswered question. . .Why? . . .Why? . . .Why?
It brought back to me Abraham, Martin, John and that heavy unbearable saddness for not only the loss of these shining lights but that such an act could be conceived of, by anyone, let alone carried out. How can this happen in MY country. . .not that it happening in another country made it any more conscionable.
Unbearable saddness. The unanswered and unimaginable why.
Long before John Lennon gave them life, the words to Imagine were indelibly printed on my heart. . .
Will it ever end, this senseless violence? A question then and a question that seems to forever echo within my mind.
I was living in a huge apartment I was remodeling about 18 blocks further uptown from the Dakota at 90th and Central Park West.
I didn’t learn about the killing until the next morning.
and I heard about it on the radio (WYSP?) in the kitchen at my mom’s house. I remember that my mom wasn’t as visibly upset as she was when Elvis died, but we also listened to pretty much every Beatles album as a sort of shiva for Lennon.
My eldest brother was a diehard Beatles fan. I grew up on them. That Christmas, we played many a Beatles song, and since I went to a hippie boarding school, we sang many Beatles tunes together that year.
My eldest brother later joined the Air Force, got high security clearance and monitered the East Germans, lest they ever decide to attack West Germany….lol. But yet, despite his military training, I don’t think he ever lost the message of Lennon. While he no longer serves, since they blew his foot off, he thinks Bush is a danger and that the Iraqi war a major blunder. And he still listens to the Beatles.
John Lennon changed the world, by changing one person at a time. He is a hero who should go down in history as a true Peacemaker. His songs reached people from all walks of life and all backgrounds. He did what all us bloggers try to do by changing people one by one to see that human is human and killing in any name is wrong.