In my life

My first year of college was not what we'd call a great success. I'd spent my time doing everything except what I was supposed to be doing and shirking responsibilities was becoming second nature to me. Still I was not giving up completely which is why the late evening of December 8, 1980 found me at the kitchen table furiously typing a paper for my interpersonal communication class that was due the next morning at 8am.

I listened to the radio as I typed and I heard John Lennon's voice singing #9 Dream and was thinking how much I loved that song. Of how my dreamy teenage self would play it over and over as a way of escaping my chaotic, hectic family. And when it was over I heard the DJ tell me that John Lennon was dead. That he'd been murdered. And my heart broke.

I have no memory of a time when I didn't know of the Beatles.

While the Beatles formed before I was born, my birth and their transformation from scruffy boys playing in loud clubs in Hamburg to the polished image we came to know happened roughly around the same time. As I grew, they grew. As I changed, they changed. And then they stopped being and for an eight year old this was somewhat puzzling. I didn't realize they could exsist without each other. I'd outgrown my notion that they lived together, a la Help but I didn't really get that they could be anything else but Beatles. I'd been hearing their music virtually my entire life, thanks to my seven years older sister, and it didn't seem possible that they could do anything without each other.

As I got older and began to explore more varied kinds of music than standard Top 40 pop or old school country music I began to see John in a new light. He was taking his famous break from making music and I was using that opportunity to discover his solo work in depth. Imagine and Walls and Bridges were favorite albums of mine by him and the images and ideas his songs provoked stayed with me. Then John began recording again and I was so anxious for more and more new stuff from him. He seemed so happy with his life and with what life had brought him and we were hearing about it. The world had John's music again. And then it was all taken away on a December night.

I spent the rest of the night typing and crying.

So long ago
Was it in a dream, was it just a dream?

[A Best of Holidailies exceptional entry]