The Day John Lennon Died

On the 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, I wrote about how I had been a huge fan of the Beatles' music -- namely "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" -- yet couldn't really remember the exact moment I heard about his assassination other than being home watching TV. Perhaps at 13 I was just young enough not to appreciate the enormity of it all, because I can remember the attempt on President Reagan's life just three months later like it was yesterday -- and I didn't even like him. But he was the president. It wasn't until many years later when I first heard Susanna Hoffs -- nearly a decade my senior and an obvious Beatles freak -- sing about the tragedy did I finally cry about it. Something about the dread in her lyrics and her plaintive vocals on "Weak With Love" -- from her 1996 self-titled sophomore LP -- took me back to that day in December 1980, and seemed to allow me to feel exactly what every Lennon fan felt at the time. And now today on the 33rd anniversary of that fateful moment outside the Dakota, I saw this moving status update on a slightly older co-worker's Facebook page, which cut even deeper.

I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina in December 1980, watching a Monday Night Football game between the Patriots and the Dolphins, when Howard Cosell interrupted the broadcast to announce that John Lennon had been shot and killed. An impromptu vigil formed up in one of my friends' rooms, as we listened to "Sergeant Pepper's" and everyone, when not sitting in stunned silence, asked, "Why the hell did someone kill John Lennon?" Eventually I left my friend's room, but I couldn't sleep. I walked outside into the cold night and ended up a stone bench in the Paul Green Theatre, and just wept for a good 10 minutes. Those tears and that pain weren't all about John Lennon, but his death had plenty to do with it. It is a night I will always remember.