Many of those of my generation (I was born in 1952) remember with specificity where they were when they heard John F. Kennedy was shot. On Nov. 22, 1963, I was 11, on a train from Minnesota with my mother, father, and four siblings bound for my maternal grandmother’s farm near Little Rock, Ark., where we had planned to spend Thanksgiving. I remember a conductor, a large African-American man with a booming voice, walking into our car and announcing with his thick Southern drawl, “The president has been shot! The president has been shot!”
The stunned passengers froze in states of disbelief and shock. My father said it couldn’t be true, and speculated that perhaps the conductor was drunk or crazy. Later, arriving at my grandma’s farmhouse filled with relatives, we sat glued to the TV, trying, like the rest of the nation and the world, to absorb the news.
Everything altered that day. As the hope for Kennedy’s “New Frontier” faded, so too did my own innocence and the optimism of America’s postwar generation. Although L.B.J. would continue to push for civil rights legislation and wage his war on poverty, he soon deepened the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, to disastrous results. Turbulent years followed.
There are other pivotal moments in history for which I vividly remember where I was when I heard the news: When Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, I witnessed it on TV at my girlfriend’s house in Minneapolis. When the Challenger exploded, I heard about it on the radio in my Hester Street studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My friend Gail Grabow first told me about AIDS, though it wasn’t called that then. We were sitting at an outside table at the Dojo restaurant on St. Marks Place when she told me about a new “gay cancer.” It’s strange what you recall — I remember I was wearing pink shoes that day. And when I heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, I was teaching an art class at the Ross School and we were painting lemons.
My memory is hazier about where I was when I learned about other historic moments, like the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Chernobyl disaster, the death of Princess Diana. However, my recollection of what I was doing the night John Lennon was killed is clear and distinct.
It was Dec. 8, 1980. I was living in a fifth-floor walkup on 14th Street with my boyfriend, David. Art school graduates, he was working as a carpenter and I was a waitress at the time. That morning, David woke up sick with a fever. As the day wore on, his fever worsened, spiking to 104, and we both got scared. We decided to go to the E.R. at Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue and 16th Street. I don’t remember how we got there, but entering the packed waiting room was a daunting experience, filled as it was with all manner of humanity: junkies, psychotics, people with various ailments demanding attention from overworked staff. It was apparent we were not a triage priority, so we waited.
It was at this point a crazed woman raced into the waiting room from outside, yelling, “I have to talk to Michael Edelman! I must speak to Michael Edelman!” The staff explained that he was being treated and she would have to wait. “No!” she screamed. “I need to talk to Michael Edelman right now!” She kept screaming the name until he appeared in a sliding window, showing raised arms bandaged on both wrists (a suicide attempt?).
“Michael!” she yelled. “John Lennon’s been shot!”
Which is how we learned.
When David was finally seen by an E.R. doctor, it was determined he was suffering from the flu and we were sent home, where he recovered after a few days. But the news of John Lennon’s death had a powerful effect on us. It made us feel that anything could happen at any time, that the world was absurd. And although we had both recently struggled and succeeded in giving up cigarettes, we decided we might as well start smoking again. Which we did, with a kind of existential defiance.
We eventually did quit smoking for good after a few years. We also regained a sense of belief in the future, got married, built a home in Springs, and had a child. We even got slightly more professional jobs in education and design. But we were, in some ways, permanently altered by John Lennon’s death. It had made us hyper-aware of the randomness of life, and it made us cherish time.
Jennifer Cross is a painter living in Springs.