"Give Peace A Chance."

People celebrate anniversaries of past events in different ways. A lot of people were remembering Pearl Harbor yesterday on its sixty-fifth anniversary. Maybe you put on the Ben Affleck movie from a couple of years ago, or possibly the classic From Here To Eternity, which starred Burt Lancaster, and defined the word kiss for a generation. Maybe you groused that the word infamy has been lost through time.

How time flies, and today is another sad anniversary to commemorate. It really has been twenty-six years to the day that I watched the television reports come first from Monday Night Football's Howard Cosell that John Lennon was dead. I was watching some lame game having some beers discussing Christmas plans with my ex when Howard made the announcement.

In my two-bedroom-apartment Palo Alto-world there was no twenty-four hour news network to view. CNN had only been recently launched that summer(June 1, 1980) and our little provider of cable was fighting with the city of Palo Alto over how cable was going to delivered to the upscale inhabitants of the town. Fortunately with the Iranian hostage crisis Nightline had come into being a little earlier that year (March 24, 1980). Nightline was only twenty minutes in length at the time. It would take another month before Ted got a full 30 minute program but he did a nice job on the fly that evening.

I remember everyone in the small apartment complex coming out into the driveway center and chatting for a good portion of the evening with one another about the tragedy, and, of course, everyone's history with the Beatles. Most of us were in our late twenties or early thirties and equated it with the other assassination traumas from our youth, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. These three great men were slain having been entrenchments within the political world. The leading pop music icon of the day assassinated seemed even more unbelievable. But at the end of our various discussions we realized what a political force John Lennon had been.

People under thirty years of age today have no conception of how large a figure John Lennon was. There are, of course, all those songs and retro footage of the Fab Four mobbed at every turn. There is quaint movie footage from the silver screen with A Hard Days Night, Help, The Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be to look at and wonder what all the commotion was about. Fans and the curious also have Beatle documentaries on DVD or in print to peruse as well.

But with most views at the past there is the growing chasm of disconnect. The loss of was spreading apart from the reality of is. There is a Lennon/Beatle song, In My Life, that encompasses this truth so completely that on this day I will play it several times. It is from the Rubber Soul album. I might play that a bunch of times today, as well. I will watch the documentary Imagine and cry at the end when Yoko Ono sums it all up, "He was my lover, my friend, my husband, my partner. He was my old soldier who fought with me."

I have tremendous respect for Yoko Ono, and thank her for preserving the legacy of John Lennon. I thank the fates that the torch Lennon carried has not faded, but has been transformed, and that a troubadour from Ireland carries his passion today.

"Give Peace A Chance."