'It's Easy If You Try'
John Lennon was gunned downed in front of the Dakota apartment building in New York City 25 years ago today.
That was one day and 39 years after Pearl Harbor, shorthand for the devastation and death that yanked us into World War II.
I have read accounts of the Day of Infamy in my history classes. I have interviewed Pearl Harbor survivors and written their stories. I have realized that, for my parents’ generation, Pearl Harbor was, in some ways, the most momentous day of their lives.
Lennon’s murder does not carry that for me, but he and the Beatles were the accompaniment for my generation. They provided the background music for us when we grew our hair and howled at the moon, when we questioned authority, when we decided (if we have) to grow up. And we were irritated, yet somehow pleased by the familiar and personal, the first time we heard “Strawberry Fields” or “Lady Madonna” in an elevator or grocery store on the Muzak.
I was living in Los Angeles when we got the Lennon call from a friend in New York. We thought it was a story or a joke or something, anything other than the death of a part of our lives.
Young people may wonder why we 50-somethings living on Good Old Days Street in the middle of Geezerville even care.
Simple: It was the music.