I'm Not the Only One

who has been spending today reflecting on the life and death of John Lennon. I know where I was when I heard the news; I know who was playing that Monday Night Football game. I remember the National Enquirer photographs in the following weeks when I went to the store with my mom. I remember looking at the back of my mom's Meet the Beatles album wondering why someone would ever want to kill a man like John Lennon for seemingly no purposes whatsoever.
Last year when my family traveled to Manhattan, my brother and I trekked through Central Park to Strawberry Fields to see the Imagine memorial. A moving, painful tribute. We walked across the street to the Dakota building, through the entranceway where the crime occurred. I hurt reflecting on it still.
John Lennon was not a messiah; he was not a rock star. He wasn't even the "greatest" musician, either from the albums he left behind or with the impact his solo work made. None of that matters to me about Lennon. What matters is that he seemed to represent what it meant to be a person, a husband, a father and someone with faults, failures, redeeming qualities and a spark of the divine that made him the special person he was. I have spent the last week gearing up for today and yet I mark today, like I have marked the last twenty-four December 8ths by thinking about and playing Lennon's music. The Beatles were, of course, The Beatles, and his solo material, was in fact, spotty. Regardless, he left songs behind that touch people with their nakedness, their honesty and their genuine truths.

My favorite John Lennon songs, the ones that speak of truth:

In My Life
A Day In the Life
Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Come Together
Across the Universe
God
Mother
Love
Instant Karma!
#9 Dream
Nobody Told Me
Watching the Wheels
Imagine

The last two are his best.

For the last fifteen months, I have sung Beautiful Boy to my son as I rock him to sleep and settle him down. When I place him in his carseat and when I bathe him. Found on his last album, Double Fantasy, it's profound as it is tragic that John utters the line "life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

Life sure as hell happened twenty-five years ago today and John Lennon's absence is still felt. In its own way, Lennon's death has helped teach and remind me that those other plans should be nothing more than loving the unplanned and not being so busy. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. My heart is on the corner of 72nd across from the Park tonight.