As a kid I had a dream: I wanted my own bicycle. When I got the bike, I must have been the happiest boy in (his hometown), maybe the world. I lived for that bike. Most kids left their bike in the backyard at night. Not me. I insisted on taking mine indoors and the first night I even kept it in my bed.
I omitted the name of this person's hometown because I didn't want to give away his identity just yet. I'll give you a related clue: The international airport of his hometown is named after him.
Oh, and he would have been 80 years old today.
He is, of course, John Lennon. It's hard to believe he's been gone for almost as long as he was alive: He was murdred on 8 December 1980, two months after turning 40.
That he was shot to death by someone who claimed to be inspired by Catcher In The Rye is a tragic irony on several levels. For one, Lennon preached peace in his songs and his everyday life. For another, Catcher is as much about youthful alienation as anything else. (Not for nothing was Mark David Chapman not the first, nor the last, killer to claim the novel as his muse, as it were.) While some of John's, and the Beatle's, songs expressed anger or sadness, they were never disengaged from the lives of the speakers, or the writers or performers, of those songs.
I mean, how alienated can someone be if, late in an all-too-brief life in which he accomplished so much, he could count getting a bicycle as a child as one of his happiest and most important memories.
Happy birthday and R.I.P., John!
(The airport is officially known as Liverpool-John Lennon International Airport, International Air Transport Association Code LPL.)
