Up and down

Yay, my eye candy has returned after a holiday hiatus! As cute as ever, perhaps more so... she's not wearing the charcoal suit today, but more of a black and white plaid suit with a pleated skirt. She also has her hair down, and it's really cute. Where's the island where they make women like this?

The quality of my afternoon just rose substantially.

Twenty-five years ago right now, I was preparing to drive back to New York for holidays at my parents' house. I was at Michigan State, and had rented a car from one of the local rent-a-wreck places. It was a baby blue 1974 Chevy Nova that looked like it used to be a staff car for Michigan Bell (now Ameritech). I picked it up Monday night and went to sleep.

Now, I of course remember all this because of what else happened on this day twenty-five years ago, when a deranged fan walked up to John Lennon on the sidewalk in front of his building, The Dakota and pumped four bullets into him. I didn't hear the news until Tuesday morning, in my last class of the morning, and the whole day changed. Tuesday, I loaded up my stuff and went around campus collecting up two passengers who were sharing the ride back with me.

I can still remember their names: Cara Miller and Ingrid Overs. Cara was from somewhere in central New York, and Ingrid was a field hockey player from York, New York, who had known a high school friend of mine, Marcy Seaburg. Cara was wearing a light blue coat.

It was snowing a little... we drove across Michigan, across the Ambassador Bridge and into southern Ontario, then across Ontario to New York. The radio played an unending sequence of the more somber Beatles and John Lennon songs, and the story of the previous day's events rolled out. The three of us didn't talk very much.

Everyone I've ever talked to my age or older remembers where they were and what they were doing that week. We knew without saying that it was much like the killing of John Kennedy seventeen years earlier. No such similar event has had the same impact for me since, except the 9/11 attacks. You who are too young to remember December 8, 1980 firsthand can probably relate to 9/11 as an analogy. This was a guy who had at least as big an impact on the world, through good rather than for evil.

I am now three years older than Lennon was when he was killed, and I've done a lot less in my time.