Twelve Eight...Then and Now

Today marks the anniversary of the shooting death of John Lennon in 1980 at the hands of a lunatic at the entrance to the former Beatles' home, the Dakota Apartments in Manhattan just across from Central Park. He was only forty and had just begun to renew his musical career with a double album release, a team effort with his wife Yoko Ono. The assassin, whose name does not merit mention, supposedly believed that he was compelled to shoot Lennon for being an impostor of sorts, in conflict with his own inner mental model that he somehow took for real. And that's all I have to say about that.

I had just come back from having a pleasant meal at IHOP in south Gainesville and quickly tuned my tiny black and white TV on to ABC to watch the tail end of the Monday Night Football game featuring "my" Miami Dolphins, struggling through a rebuilding year and trying to ruin the playoff hopes of their divisional rival New England. Which they accomplished, booting the game-winning field goal at the tail end of the game, to loud cheers from the home Miami crowd. But I quickly learned with that good news that something very bad had happened: John Lennon had just been shot. It wasn't long before his death was reported, and soon after the game (then) ABC correspondent Geraldo Rivera was given free rein to discuss the matter, especially in the context of the friendship he had developed with the Lennons.

When someone dies, like Lennon in 1980, there is no next year, no 1981. For him, the universe has been extinguished while, from the viewpoint of the rest of the universe, the converse is true. The question I have may sound a bit silly, but I think it is pertinent nevertheless: is there such a thing as 1980? That year (well, most of it) contained within it the life essence of John Lennon, walking and breathing on Earth. Yes, that sweeping line of the "now" that separates past from future is currently 31 years down the road. But does that "now" determine reality in and of itself?

What do you think?