Ray Davies writes: It had just turned December on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I was on my customary morning jog, heading out of Central Park toward 72nd Street. The sun was out but it was treacherous underfoot. I’d slipped on some ice and gone tumbling, to be rescued by a group of college boys.
“Are you all right, sir?” they asked, sounding concerned in a way that indicated that I might have looked frail, fragile and quite possibly old. I felt like saying, “Of course I’m all right, man, can’t you see that I am a globe-trotting rock star?” But I saw the genuine concern in the boys’ faces and thanked them, cautiously continuing my run.
Poignant seems too much of a cliché, but so it is.
Yoko Ono writes: The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds. He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up. We all knew that he upset certain powerful people with it. But that was John. He couldn’t have been any other way. If he were here now, I think he would still be shouting the truth. Without the truth, there would be no way to achieve world peace.
On this day, the day he was assassinated, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea.
They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I see many teenagers sad and angry with each other. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed.
Another appreciation: We remember what we remember of Lennon, and of that night. When I was young, he was the only adult that mattered outside my family — the Beatle of Beatles. I loved his wit; his irony; his “Help!”; his urgent, reedy voice; his unceasing transformations. Like everyone else who loved him, I can’t help grieving, even now, for all the transformations we lost 30 years ago when John Lennon was only 40.
A nice picture gallery at the Washington Post. And another tribute. And a gallery of pictures from 1980: curious to see an NYPD officer wearing a tie.
His books include Skywriting by word of mouth, and other writings, including The ballad of John and Yoko, and In his own write & A Spaniard in the works.
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