THINKING OF JOHN
by Jude Southerland Kessler
author of
Shoulda Been ThereTo all of us... joy on this very blessed fall day on which John Lennon was born.
Photo by Yoko Ono Lennon
I notice that in his new book, Phillip Norman falls back on the beloved myth of John being born in a bombing raid... of Mimi running through the streets of Liverpool as bombs fell around her. And although that literally never happened (there was only a small skirmish over Garston and Aigburth on 9 October 1940), nothing was ever so real.
John lived his life dodging bullets. He endured the whim of fate that pulled Julia to a new life with John Dykins, Jacqui, and Ju. He was as much "a little soldier" as John-John Kennedy ever was when Fred took to sea that last time in 1946, and Julia dragged her son home from Blackpool to a life in Liverpool... a life with her duty-bound sister, Mimi, and Uncle Ge'rge.
John sidestepped the bullets of genius (it has its downside) and originality. No one was ever really "in his tree." He was – for most of his childhood – out on a limb, alone. He dodged the dangers of being different...the boy who lived with his aunt and uncle while his mum lived only a mile or so away, content with a life of her own.
Fate was never John's friend. It took Ge'rge just as John turned teen – just as he needed a male friend and advisor the most. Death walked up in big shoes and claimed Julia, just when she'd become John's best friend.
And when fate gave him Stu, John must have known there would be no happy ending. For John, there never was. He must have winced a little at the thought of laughing with Stu and sharing his dreams and planning a future. The future was never John's to plan.
From the very beginning, John belonged to us. God, I believe, had chosen him for great work... work that could only be accomplished through heartbreak. John wrote, at odd intervals and in strange places, the soundtrack of our lives. But that gorgeous, moving, never-to-be-forgotten creation was rendered at great, personal sacrifice. He gave up his life so that we could have beauty in ours.
Don't get me wrong. I don't feel sorry for John. I know that today he is "free as a bird," safe, home and dry. And I know that if he had it all to do over again, he'd chose the same path. He'd live in the Bambi Kino, put up with inane reporter's questions, throw back the same ungodly amount of alcohol, kick around the same haunts in Hamburg, swear just as violently and often, scream curses in the night... take anything, endure anything to give us what he gave.
He'd step right back into the slipstream of time and see himself once again as a "nowhere man," "a loser," a man for whom there is no chance of happiness... just to spin that silver web that was and is his music.
And so today, on his birthday, I celebrate with you his tenacity and courage. When so many rockers "chucked it all" and gave up, John pressed on to whatever life had for him next. He never gave up.
I celebrate his humor, his wry smiles, his Scouse wit, his upside-down way of looking at the world that set us on our ears.
I celebrate his art, his music, his vision of world peace, his off the wall way of thinking.
And I celebrate the memory of this funny, angry, kind, cruel, brilliant, naïve, larger-than-life, insecure, joyous, fearful, creative, bored, hostile, and loving man who left the earth a far better place than he found it.
Bombs fell all around him from day one. But he never let that deter him from what he was sent here to do.
Happy Birthday, my friend.
Jude
Published October 9, 2008
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