To tell the truth, I don’t remember much about it. Only two moments stay in my memory, but forty years have passed, and I still recall those two moments.
I was 21, and I was working at Brentano’s Bookstore in South Coast Plaza (maybe the best job I ever had, but that’s another story). It was a fairly busy evening. Fortunes had not yet turned on bookstores (or malls, for that matter), and the holiday season was chaotic. People would be standing outside the gate when we opened it in the morning, and we had to put on Bruckner’s 9th to get people to leave at closing.
I was walking past the jewelry counter, in retrospect it is very odd that a bookstore had a jewelry counter, but it seemed to make sense at the time. As I passed, the woman working behind the counter called me over.
“My father just called, John Lennon was shot, he’s dead.”
I remember distinctly that my first response was, “Oh, that’s nonsense. Where did he hear that?” This person had a touch of the dramatic (as we all did) and occasionally said things that did not turn out to be true. Broader than this, though, it couldn’t be true. Such an iconic, seemingly immortal figure couldn’t be gone in such a matter of fact manner. And who in their right mind would shoot John Lennon?
As I think back forty years ago, it’s surprising that there was essentially no way to discover whether this was true or not. There were no TV sets nearby, and there wasn’t even a radio in the store since we played classical records all day. It’s hard to Imagine how many things we simply had to leave unknown, how many mysteries never were solved. We worked the next few hours of the shift with no knowledge of what had happened, and no one came by who told us any more. It was Christmas and we were busy.
Until I got to my car to go home. As I turned on the engine, the radio came on and a John Lennon song was playing. I knew.
Someone asked me tonight as I was reminiscing whether John Lennon was really important to me, and I had to say no. I appreciated the Beatles and I liked some of his music, but I couldn’t claim to be a fan. But still, there was something about that death, unexpected death out of nowhere that struck me differently than other famous deaths before. I felt the utter transience of life, and that anyone (not me, because I still assumed that I was immortal) could be taken away without reason or notice.
Be safe, be strong.