Happy birthday, John

Yesterday would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday. I saw many references to it, and I find it very interesting that thirty years after he was killed, he is still remembered and even revered by so many. He was the Beatle who meant the most to me, and I followed his career closely. I was among those who were devastated when he was shot and killed.

I found this picture of him on the Internet, and if you enlarge it, you can see it is made of myriad different images of him. I remember when he took several years off to raise his little son and be a stay-at-home dad. Not many men would do that in those days, although today it's much more common. He was such a creative and amazingly talented person, but I am still surprised that he is still in the hearts of so many of us. I still miss him, and I wonder what he would have done with those thirty years that were taken from him.

Today is a special day in other ways, too. It's October 10, 2010, or 10/10/10. Next year we'll have an 11/11/11, and the year after that, 12/12/12 which is supposed to be the End of the World. Or some believe it's 12/21/12, to be exact, right at the Solstice. I spent some time reading about it on Wikipedia and found that the ancient Mayan calendar ends at that time, and several other people and fringe groups project significance on the date. I suppose as we get closer we will have many more apocalyptic warnings. Reminds me of the Y2K hysteria.

Today, however, I can simply admire the symmetry of the alignment of all those tens lined up in a row. Exactly the same number of years that John had stolen from him by a madman's gun. I can still wonder what he might have accomplished in those years. When I look at Sir Paul McCartney's thirty-year journey, and compare what I think John would have accomplished, I speculate about where John's brilliant and unique mind would have traveled.

We were of a similar age. He was born in 1940, and I was born in 1942. I will be seventy in two years, and it's been an amazing thirty years, when I think back to the person I was in 1980 and travel backwards in time through my memories. One event stands out: a few days after John was killed, there was a worldwide solemn moment of silence planned at noon, I believe. I know it was in the middle of the day, and I was in sunny Boulder just leaving one of my favorite restaurants. Suddenly it grew quiet all around me, and I remembered the planned moment of silence and stopped where I was and allowed myself to feel the heaviness in my heart.

It grew very quiet, no cars whizzing by. The only sound at that moment was from a young man riding by on a motorcycle with a boom box on it, playing "Strawberry Fields Forever" at full volume. Everywhere around me I saw tears glinting on faces, loss and grief fresh for a man we only knew through his music. But what music it was.

Happy birthday, John. I still hear your music wafting through the airwaves, almost every day, thirty years later. Your songs have never lost their magic. I guess they never will.