A Tribute to John Lennon (October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980)

December is a month for commemorations, and this week sees two that have people bowing heads and remembering where they were when they first heard the news. For my mother's generation, December 7th marks the day the world changed forever. For boomers like me, the 8th strikes a mournful chord that has resonated for twenty-seven years.

On December 8, 1980, Mark Chapman shot John Lennon outside the Dakota in Manhattan. He died shortly afterward and left the world a poorer place.

As the Beatles rose to fame in the 1960s, each made the leap from young-man-with-talent to iconic figure, and none looked as good on an icon as John. His sharp-featured, classic profile became immediately recognizable in any medium, and his voice, both singing and speaking, could be identified by millions the world over within seconds of opening his mouth.

Everyone had their "favorite" Beatle, and it was said you could tell a lot about a person by theirs. The pop-psych of the time had it that those whose luv was for John were the more intellectual fans, deeper thinkers than anyone gone all squishy by Paul's puppy dog eyes, clamoring to take care of poor little RIngo or sucked in by the mystery that was George. John was the writer; not only part of the team creating the music, but an author of books, an artist, a thinker.

For baby boomers like me, it's a big chunk of precious gray matter that must be taken up by lyrics to Beatles' songs and later Lennon hits. Any get-together in my family will end up with someone breaking out a guitar and leading a sing-a-long, and we can carry on for hours without ever leaving the Fab Four and post-Beatles Lennon tunes. Even with my brothers and me putting the years on as we are, we remember the words. (We may not sing "When I'm Sixty-four" with quite so cavalier a lilt, but we can still sing it.)

John would be sixty-seven now, a picture that's almost impossible to conjure until I look down at my own liver-spotted hands. That he would be contributing is not a question, although how different the world might be had he not been murdered is one I ask myself every December.

He would, of course, be Sir John now, unless he chose to turn down Queen's honors, which I doubt as he most certainly would have mellowed some as he aged and forgiven the "Old Girl" her royalness. (Remember the "rattle your jewelry" crack when they played Albert Hall?)

Perhaps by now he would have moved into politics or defined peace in an achievable way, written a song that would have rallied the world to temper religion with tolerance, or pushed for funding for research that would have had antiretrovirals available to AIDS victims a decade or more ago.

We will never know what Mark Chapman took from the future world on the 8th of December twenty-seven years ago, but at the moment we heard the news, we all felt the loss.

A seeker of knowledge, he pondered, and gave us ponder material, so much so that even all these years later we continue to "Imagine".