First Person: How John Lennon Influenced Me and the World I Grew Up In

I was driving on I-95, a familiar stretch from West Hartford to Springfield late in the evening of Dec. 8, 1980, when the radio news jarred me: another hero of my generation shot dead. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, the most popular rock group of all time, murdered. By a so-called fan. How could a fan kill the object of his affections? What made him do it? How and why blended into a fog of incomprehension as I mechanically moved the car along the highway, all senses frozen in disbelief.

The DJ provided sound for my thoughts, playing one of Lennon's most poignant songs, "Imagine."

"Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people, living for today...

Imagine all the people, living life in peace... "

I couldn't help wonder what the words to the song might have meant to Lennon as he lay dying. And what the words might have meant for the world if Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, had heeded them and lived in peace. It was that one song I listened to over and over in my quest to come to terms with the death of a childhood idol.

For the sound of the Beatles was the sound of my childhood. My first memory of the Beatles is hearing John Lennon and Paul McCartney's I Want to Hold Your Hand about the time they announced they were coming to America in 1964. I probably venerated them at age 6 mainly because my 11-year-old sister and her best friend said they were the best band ever. And if they said this was their favorite band, then the Beatles were my favorite band. When they watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, I did what little sisters do.

But if my initial attraction to the Beatles was less than genuine, it wasn't long before I appreciated the Beatles in my own right.

As I grew up, the Beatles were always there, changing with my changing world. From the innocence of hand-holding and the first kiss to psychedelic fantasy, the music of the Beatles reflected their growth as well as society's and my own.

Hey Jude, another song credited to Lennon and Paul McCartney, haunted me in a very personal way. For years, the meaning of the heart-rending lyrics was knotted into a panic-fueled ball of confusion. I must have been 10 or 11 when I was listening to that song in my bedroom. In stormed my mother, raging, her eyes glazed, her motions rigid. She didn't snap the record in half, as she had sometime earlier with Lady Godiva, but she may as well have, I was so fearful of listening to it after that. It took years before I understood the obvious meaning of the lyrics, so concerned I was about finding the secret subtext that set off my mother.

There was one more time when the music of John Lennon set my course, not long after his death. The circumstances are almost too embarrassing to acknowledge. Alone in my apartment, listening to The Ballad of John and Yoko when I should have been reading a case book, I heard the song's casual references to countries I had never been to -- Holland and France -- and was overcome with the urge to roam Europe. As soon as the school placement office opened, I was there, rummaging through files in the hopes of finding an international program that would fit my nonexistent budget. Whether you call it impulsiveness or serendipity, it was my intrigue with the casual continental mentions in The Ballad of John and Yoko that led me to an international seminar that was the high point of my academic career and a life-changing experience.

Remembering John Lennon isn't just about him; it's about how he influenced me and the world I grew up in.