And as I said above, if piggy's story is accurate, I'll gladly modify my opinion of his story. But, you know, it was 25 years ago, so describing it today as "I remember the day it happened" and talking about it as though it was morning still sounds wrong to me, since the then 13 year old is now almost 40. But I take your point that a then 13 year old might not have heard about it until the next morning.
If it’s true, I will gladly apologize for being skeptical of it
No need to apologize for skepticism around here.
I responded to the earlier posts without reading thru the thread -- usually not a good idea, so my apologies for that.
You're right, I should have said "the day after" or "when I heard" or something like that.
There are some events which make you hyper-aware, which fix your attention. I don't recall all the details, but some of them are still vivid. When my brother told me, I was putting on socks. (I used to take my clothes into the bathroom, shower, dry off, and dress in there.)
As it happened, the Beatles were very important to me then. My oldest brother was 10 years older. My best friend Mike had a brother who was 11 years older. I first really listened to the Beatles in my brother's Mustang, on 8 track. He'd play '62-66 and '67-70 when we rode with him.
So that was our introduction to rock and roll. Our brothers' Beatles records were the first ones we started listening to, before we moved on to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd (my most enduring musical passion), and Jethro Tull. As was (and I reckon still is) usual for boys that age, we started trying to learn guitar. We learned Beatles' lyrics and wrote our own songs. It was one of those things that held us together, like punk would be soon afterward for me and another group of friends.
I started writing poetry at 10 years old, after Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" showed me that poems could be powerful things. By the time I was 13, Lennon had already had a profound effect on my writing -- I recall one poem that was a response to "Across the Universe".
Btw, the reason I recall carving the Harrison lyric into a desk was that, well first of all it was the first time I'd vandalized anything, but more importantly the next day (or perhaps a few days later) someone carved something totally stupid in response. It fed my budding teen arrogance, and was confirmation that the rest of the kids in that town were a pack of Phillistines and to hell with them. But us... we knew what was what and what was good and what had value.
I still have a couple of full-page drawings I did after Lennon's murder (from my Magritte-inspired surrealist phase) -- one was a watch (my own wristwatch) stopped at the day and time of his murder, with pieces of the face shattered out and other scenes showing through, and the words "Stupid Bloody Monday" written across it (yes, typical juvenile stuff); the other was an abstract of his face, with trademark hair and glasses, composed of objects.
All of which is to say... my reaction at the time, and my memory of it, really aren't unusual at all.
