Strawberry Fields Forever
Happy birthday, John Lennon.
I was walking through Central Park today on my way to Strawberry Fields when I passed a lovely setting on the Glade Arch where there had clearly just been a luncheon, complete with pretty tablecloths and floral arrangements. As I continued on my walk towards the west side of the park, there was a trail of women in high heels walking towards the Bethesda Fountain, whose crowning sculpture, Angel of the Waters, was, incidentally, designed by a female sculptor, Emma Stebbins, and is thought to be modeled after her life partner, Charlotte Cushman.
It turned out that these ladies were on their way to join what must have been the main event, a fundraiser hosted by the park’s Women’s Committee, perched next to The Lake (which is actually the name of the body of water there, where tourists perpetually row backwards in the rental boats). If you were looking for preternaturally thin wealthy white women wearing animal prints today, then this is where they all seemed to be congregating.
I found my people at Strawberry Fields.
It’s October 9th, which means it’s John Lennon’s birthday. He would have been 85 years old today, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been 45 years since his death; it’s also his son Sean’s 50th birthday today, and I wonder how it feels to him to have outlived his father by 10 years.
Today there was a gathering of every kind of person to celebrate how lucky we were to have John in our world, even for the brief shining time that he was given. We were a scruffy bunch surrounding a band serenading us with classics, like “All You Need Is Love”, that everyone could sing along to word for word, and lesser known, but no less brilliant, offerings like “Every Little Thing”, where most people could only join in on the chorus. There was an impromptu mosh pit, and an autistic young man who knew every note and was clearly feeling the joy. There were office workers in suits, retirees in leather jackets, mothers with babies, young punks and old drunks. It was magic.
It was during “Watching the Wheels” when I choked up and struggled to sing along.
People say I’m crazy
Doing what I’m doing
Well, they give me all kinds of warnings
To save me from ruin
When I say that I’m okay, well they look at me kinda strange
“Surely, you’re not happy now, you no longer play the game”
People say I’m lazy
Dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice
Designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I’m doing fine watching shadows on the wall
“Don’t you miss the big time boy, you’re no longer on the ball?”
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I don’t know exactly why that song hit me so hard, but I’ve thought about it a lot as I was walking home later. Last week, I was walking in Central Park with a good friend, whose USAID-funded job was DOGEd in February. She suddenly found herself in her mid-60s looking for work, which was never the plan; she’s still looking, and unemployment benefits have now run out. She was telling me that she recently learned on a career coaching webinar that only 1000 new jobs were created in New York City in the first six months of this year.
In a city of 8 million people, that’s pretty astonishing.
I spend most of my days lately trying to think outside the box. Work is thin and newsrooms are struggling to keep their full-time staff employed, let alone freelancers. All I really want to do is write great stories and connect with readers — and get paid for it. Is that too much to ask? Maybe it is these days.
So this afternoon I took a break from pitching stories, trying to connect with new editors, applying for fellowships and teaching positions, and looking for contract work. I just stopped. I watched the wheels. I thought about how being a working artist is still the dream.
I remember a bit on an old episode of “Seinfeld” when Jerry is dating a young woman and he asks her where she was when Kennedy was shot and she says, “Ted Kennedy was shot?!”
I wasn’t born yet when JFK and Malcolm X were killed, and was a toddler when the same happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. I wonder sometimes if these times we live in now feel eerily familiar to the way adults felt then. Those were times that fueled John Lennon’s music and activism, and hearing his songs today was a sad reminder of how far we have not come, while a balm to the soul at the same time.
I do remember where I was when John Lennon was shot though. I was 14 years old and had already started wearing through my vinyl copy of “Double Fantasy”, which I had stood in line out in the rain to pick up from the local record store just a few weeks earlier. On the night of December 8, 1980, I was sitting in my room listening to the clock radio while doing homework when the DJ broke into the broadcast with the news that John had been shot outside his apartment building in New York. I remember walking out into the living room to tell my dad, who had actually seen the Beatles in concert at Shea Stadium when he was a teenager, said, “That can’t be right”, but he turned on the news and there it was. We both sat there in shock.
At the time, we lived in Annapolis, Maryland, and a few days after the shooting, Yoko Ono called for everyone to peacefully gather on the morning of December 14th in his memory. The vigil in Annapolis was scheduled to take place on the grounds of the state capital building in the center of town, but my friends and I decided that we would sit out on Saturday night and start our vigil then. We each told our parents that we were staying at someone else’s house — that was the GenX life, parents never checked up on our stories — and we pulled together backpacks of snacks, candles, cigarettes and thermoses of coffee.
And so we sat out there all night, on a chilly December night, and sang songs and hugged each other and cried our hearts out. The world felt so unfair. We wanted to be sure that we did things that would make a difference and keep the world moving in the right direction.
Today, it’s hard to feel that we’ve succeeded. And maybe that’s why I felt so bereft earlier today — I work really hard to find and tell stories that I think can make a difference, that can remind us of where we’ve been, what’s better, and what still needs to be done. It’s hard when those opportunities become scarcer, especially when the world feels so fragile.
Ah, people asking questions
Lost in confusion
Well, I tell them there’s no problem
Only solutions
Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I’ve lost my mind
I tell them there’s no hurry, I’m just sitting here doing time
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
I just had to let it go
Do you have John Lennon memories? Tell me about it in the comments.
Our people, too. We were there, too. So sorry we missed you.