The day-to-day aspects of life fade. Memory falters. Details blur.
Late fall and early winter, 1980: Way too much of my life was spent in school, and despair creeped in, as I realized school was preparing me for a life I didn't want and couldn't understand. No one understood, no one cared. I had known my classmates all my life, yet they seemed stranger, more unfamiliar with every passing day.
My life was lived at the movies. A new arthouse theater, The Movies 1 and 2, had opened in Des Moines, and sometimes it seemed as though my brother and I spent every waking moment in the dark, Bad Timing and Eraserhead and Wise Blood, Singin' In The Rain and Reefer Madness, more education than I could ever gather at school, new ways of looking at the world, new sights to see.
And music, of course, a radio always turned on, an LP always on the turntable, as necessary as breathing.
But the details, again, unclear. I was depressed all the time, in therapy that got me nowhere, and so it makes sense that I went to bed early that night. Not that I could sleep, I could never sleep, but laying awake in the dark provided comfort from the crushing light.
The radio was on, of course. KKRL out of Carroll, what might later be termed an "adult alternative' station, but at that time was simply the only station that played Warren Zevon or Ry Cooder album cuts. I don't remember what music they played that night, before or after. I only remember the cut-in: "We have some news here out of New York City. John Lennon has been shot and killed..."
Just like that.
This detail, fixed in my mind forever. The world would keep turning, but at a different angle. The sun would still rise, but what would the light reveal? Life would go on, but it could be stopped in a second, by a freak accident, by cancer, by a bullet or four.
My life has taken unexpected directions, has gone places that surprised and delighted me, that filled me with overwhelming despair. None of it could have been anticipated or planned. It would be hokey to say I have tried to model my life after John Lennon's, and wrong. He was a child of modest means who became a bazillionaire, plus he was a genius. I came from nothing and have nothing, and I write in total obscurity.
But at some point in his life, he realized he had to stop doing what was expected of him, and make a radical break from the life he was living and build a new life, whatever people would think of it. And for me, on December 8th of 1980, something shifted, something changed. The life I had led was coming to an end, and I began the painful journey to becoming an adult, the adult I am now, the person I'm still becoming.
