Echoes

This very moment, twenty-three years ago, I was driving a car from East Lansing, Michigan to Western New York. There were four of us in the car, stunned by the news that John Lennon had been killed outside his apartment building, the old Dakota, in Manhattan. You couldn't go half an hour without hearing "Imagine" on the AM radio in that Pontiac I borrowed from a friend for the trip. It was snowing as we drove across southern Ontario on the 401, and there seemed to be no other news.

I can't remember where I was when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed, though I existed. I remember hearing about the killings of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy from my uncles. I didn't really know who King was, since we had essentially no black people in the town in which I lived, and my uncles threw the term "RFK" around as if I was supposed to know precisely who it was.

All these years later, now I know. I am older than John Lennon was, older than Martin Luther King, almost exactly the age of Robert Kennedy, and quickly approaching the age of JFK at the time he died. And I've done a lot less.

There's a point in your life where you realize that you probably aren't going to shake the world. You start moving toward wanting to stop the bad shaking it's already undergoing, never mind induce some good shaking. Good vibrations. I do believe in a sort of harmonic resonance, sort of like the old "is it live, or is it Memorex?" commercials. A small local sound can move things around at a great distance if it's placed and amplified correctly. So no, I don't try to do huge, world-shaking things any more. I try to do small, local things... pass my thoughts on to a few people and hope the ripples set up that sort of cognitive resonance in others at a distance.

I am going to go drink for a while.