John and Yoko

I was just listening to the old Dick Cavette interview of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was taped around 1971. Apparently it’s the anniversary of John’s death today. Dick Cavette wrote in his usually charmed and eloquent style of how he came to interview the odd iconic pair. Insights he’s gained in the ensuing years on what it meant and how it went.

John talked about death for just a minute. He wasn’t comfortable with the fame he had, and ruminated on how fame really made the experience of being a Beatle kind of awful. He just wanted to be left alone to write music. And be with Yoko. He said he didn’t really care about what happened after he died. He wanted to be forgotten. He marveled at how when a person said something he probably forgot it immediately and someone would bring it up years later and say, “what about this thing you said?” And John made the joke that he had forgotten it or his mood had changed. Almost as if someone else had said it.

This was oddly prophetic coming from a man who, after his death, has been quoted through his song and speech countless times. Everything he said became a sort of gospel. But I was so charmed by him, just sitting there being John Lennon. The fact that he never got old and became this doddering old guy in an interview filmed with some other talk show host, maybe plugging his memoirs or his latest album, struck me as oddly funny. John would never grow old. He inadvertently discovered the fountain of youth by dying young and leaving a sweet, intelligent, highly-quotable legacy.

My birthday came a few days ago. I wrote as my FB status: growing old is a privilege. When I wrote that, I was thinking how so many people in my life will not celebrate a birthday ever again. I think of my friends over the years who have died, my father, other family members who would love to share a beer and toast themselves over a too-sweet piece of cake and a candle. That’s how that felt when I wrote that. Now a few days into my 49^th year (ouch) I am revisiting that phrase. John Lennon made me think that maybe the privilege is not just having a birthday but redefining yourself as you age. John is the same forever now, unable to say anything more. Whatever he is remembered for is static, perhaps being reinterpreted like scripture by the priests of modern-day historians.

The privilege is really ours to squander.  I am not the person I was even a few months ago. Life forces me to change and duck and roll as it continuously throws punches my way. But that’s not new. I’m just more aware of it now since the changes of the last year forced me to wake up, strap in and grab the wheel of this out-of-control race car. Not even a year ago I told myself I could not see the future. I was too busy looking back at the past trying to understand what the hell that was and mourn its demise. At best, it’s a hazy view looking over my shoulder at the past. There are sweet spots and bitter, bright and cloudy. Even though the view was bad, it was better than looking at the bleakness ahead. I just saw an empty landscape there.

I don’t know how it happens, but life moves through all the time. I am not even aware of its motion. I am like a ship crossing a great ocean at night. No points reference. Nothing to hang onto but the stars. And suddenly I’m in this new part of the ocean. Had I been paying attention I would have seen it coming, or relaxed knowing that it would eventually arrive. Wherever the now location is, I see something here I didn’t know existed: the chance to make of it whatever I want. If I ignore the opportunity altogether, the environment will be the defining factor. However I approach it, I’m in this new oceanscape. And unlike John, I can change what happens now.