Today, on my morning train, I paused my iPod and addressed the man across the aisle.
“Interesting reading selection for today,” I began. He replied with a puzzled look and I realized that he had no idea what I was talking about. This surprised me for a beat but I recovered, reminding myself that not everyone is dialed into the same things and this guy, despite appearing to be in his early fifties, might never have cared about today’s anniversary.
“Thirty years ago, today, John Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman who presented that book as his ‘statement’,” I reminded him.
“That was today?” He was taken aback. He looked at the cover of the book, a white jacketed paperback copy of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
“I’ve never read it,” he admitted. “I’d been meaning to get to it for a while.”
Another pause.
He looked at me, seemingly puzzled, and asked, “I haven’t seen anything in here that make sense as a reason to kill John Lennon.” He looked down to the open page where he’d placed his bookmark, “I’m not even sure that I like it.”
“I liked it better when I was a teenager,” I replied. “Chapman was crazy. No book can explain that.”
Silence sprouted in the aisle. I have an uncanny knack for killing conversations.
The man soon returned to his book and my mind wandered to the passage that Chapman read at his sentencing in which Holden Caulfield imagined himself as the protector of the innocents who might range too far in a field of rye and step off a cliff. Caulfield fancied that he could catch them and, in saving them, preserve their innocence. Chapman somehow hoped to save the innocence of the world by killing Lennon.
Instead, he stole another shred of our innocence extinguished a guiding star.
The train lurched toward my stop and I stood to queue at the door. Remembering my iPod, I pressed play and climbed down the steps to the closing notes of “Mind Games”.
R.I.P. John Winston Ono Lennon
b. 9 October 1940
d. 8 December 1980
