A Life-Changing Event 23 Years Ago

Twenty three years ago, I woke up and my life was changed. I didn't realize it at the time, and in fact it was almost a decade before I even began to suspect the significance of the day, but it eventually became clear to me that this was the turning point. My life was headed in one direction before, and in another direction after I woke up and heard that John Lennon had been murdered.

This is extraordinarily difficult to explain. I grew up in a home where classical music always provided the background, and although the Ed Sullivan Show was definitely a weekly event in the house, I was quite late in developing any appreciation of rock 'n roll, the Beatles. Although by 1980 I was a DJ for my college radio station, and pretty thoroughly caught up with a lot of the popular culture that I had ignored as a youngster, I still wasn't a big John Lennon fan. In fact, of the four Beatles, he was the one I had paid the least attention to over the years, but I was affected by his death far more than I knew, and far more than I could have anticipated.

It has nothing to do with music, really. Despite the fact that I was involved in college radio, and despite the fact that I had taken up guitar in my teens, I had no illusions of making any sort of career in the music business. Prior to that day, in fact, my intention had been to go to law school. After that day I wasn't at all sure what I was going to do, but deep down I knew that I wasn't going to do what I had previously thought I was going to do. There was no "Eureka" moment, and my eventual entry into the computer business didn't become inevitable until more than two years later. I never sat down and told myself "Well, John is dead, so it's time to set a new direction in your life." I was sad, as many other people were, and shocked as I think just about everyone was, but that's all. Or so I thought for a long time.

I'm not going to start publicly psycho-analyzing myself to try to explain all this. There's a narcissistic element to every blog, I think, but I don't really want to end this post with it being about me. You might be able to guess some of underlying truth, and it's fine by me if you do. If I provoke you to think a bit about some of the unexpected and possibly unsuspected events that changed the course of your life, that's even better. But my purpose in taking notice here of the effect that John Lennon's death had on my life is to remember John... a good, creative, and altogether extraordinary man. He touched many a life in his time, and after his time, in ways that he undoubtedly knew, and in ways that he couldn't possibly know. He probably never expected it, but he undoubtedly accepted it.