No hell below us, above us only sky
Allow me to introduce you to this week's Flashback prompt:
Where were you when...?
Our parents' generation can recall exactly what they were doing when JFK was shot - it's a cultural moment that defines a generation. What big cultural event occurred during your childhood/youth that you recall clearly, if juvenile-ly? What was its impact on you?
Oh the possibilities.
I remember the Challenger explosion, when Reagan was shot, and when MTV, CNN, and HBO each launched. I remember the oil crisis of the 70s, when the Berlin Wall fell in the 80s, and vividly recall fighting to stay awake into the wee small hours of the morning to watch the spectacle of Prince Charles and Lady Diana's royal wedding.
In other words, I'm old as crap.
But the cultural moment from my childhood that I remember most vividly was John Lennon's death.
I was ten years old and sitting in my fifth grade classroom that December morning when my teacher announced that Lennon had been shot and killed the night before. I think her plan was to craft from his death some kind of "teachable moment." Yes, death is inexplicable and often unexpected, children. We cannot always make sense of it, but we can honor the life of the person who died by remembering them. Ashes to ashes, circle of life, we return to the soil from whence we came. Now let's all hold hands and have a moment of silence and blah blah blah empty clichéd sentiments BLAH.
Not that I blame her for trying. Sometimes the only thing holding us upright and keeping us from being flooded with torrents of incomprehensible black terror is the safety of cliché and well-worn sentiment. Dust to dust, amen.
But unlike a lot of other kids my age, I was a fan. No, wait, not just a fan. That word is much too small, too mild.
I grew up in rooms filled with John Lennon's music, cherishing my parent's old Beatles albums the way my daughter loves the stuffed dog friend she drags with her everywhere we go, its faux fur so drenched to the follicles with her life experience that even a good soaking can't wrench the crusts of her memories from it. I remember being five years old and roller skating in our garage to "Abbey Road." I remember at seven wearing deep grooves in the absurdly thick vinyl of their third LP "Something New," and later, at age nine, passionately fixating on Lennon's 50s throwback solo album "Rock 'n' Roll" and it's timeless, jangly pop. I wasn't just a fan, and I didn't just love The Beatles. Rather, The Beatles were, for all intents and purposes, the very substance and spirit of music to me as a child.
After hearing from my teacher about what had happened, the rest of the day was gray and jittery, like the projection of a mangled old thirty-five millimeter reel. Something in the world had shaken loose. I'd never lost anyone close to me before, no family or friend had ever died during my lifetime, and so I had no reference points to make sense of what I was feeling. Really, it was death -- its mystery and its frightening permanence -- that was rattling around in my skullcase, making the world shudder. My ten year old brain just couldn't get a handle on it. I barely spoke a word the rest of the day.
At three o'clock I shuffled home from school alone, following the wide dirt footpath that ran from my grade school out into a vast Colorado prairie, pockmarked by countless prairie dog mounds and scraggly tufts of spent Indian grass. In the distance, I could make out the first peaked roofs of our nascent housing development, and beyond that the immutable Rocky Mountains, smothered in December clouds heavy with snow.
I don't recall crying, though I know that I felt like crying. Instead I stopped and gazed back in silence at the trail behind me, at the bridge over the creek edging school property I'd crossed, shadowed by a dark ribbon of trees at its banks. The path I'd taken, and the whole of the physical world around me, seemed to sag perceptibly under some heavy but invisible weight. It was the same weight, I guessed, that I'd felt pulling at the contents of my chest all day long, tugging my insides ever more insistently downward, back to the dirt beneath my feet.
What cultural moment from your childhood left its mark on you?
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Other fine ladies participating in this week's flashback:
Her Bad Mother: http://www.badladies.blogspot.com
Whoorl: http://whoorl.com
Oh The Joys: http://othejoys.blogspot.com
Mamalogues: http://mamalogues.com/
Mrs. Flinger: http://mrs.flinger.us/
