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December 8th, 2025, Monday. John Lennon was brutally murdered 45 years ago on this very day. An event that changed my life.

45 years ago, I was on a bowling team for the book publisher that I worked at, and on Monday nights, I was at the Parkway Lanes in Garfield, New Jersey.

Bill and I attended a memorial service on Saturday morning, and it was pleasant. It was a celebration of James Williams’s life. I think it’s official, I am invited to the barbecue.

We had rented a car for the day, and there was a plan to go to the cemetery and then the repast, but after the memorial, Bill suggested just not going, and I was fine with that.

So we got in the car and drove around, winding up in Lodi, specifically the neighborhood where I grew up. Took a selfie outside the house where I was raised, and saw a neighbor’s door open, so I rang their bell and spoke to Sharon, whom I hadn’t seen since 2019.

She initially mistook me for my brother Brian, even though I’m generally mistaken for Frank. Bill and I sat with Sharon for a short while. I knew it could have been a longer visit, so I decided to keep things short. She wound up giving me about a dozen rolls to take home.

That whole neighborhood is basically gone; no one I know except for Sharon. A trip back to Hoboken was easy enough. I stopped at the dispensary and the supermarket and then home, where I made dinner for Bill and myself, penne pesto and chicken.

So we drove past the Parkway Lanes on Saturday afternoon, and on December 8th, 1980, I had finished bowling for the night, and on the way home, stopped off at 7-Eleven, where I purchased a copy of Playboy that had an interview with John Lennon in it as well as Yoko Ono.

They had just released Double Fantasy a few weeks earlier, and of course, I had a copy of it did not expect what I heard, which was basically John adapting to turning 40.

I was up in my room reading Playboy, the interview when around 10:20, perhaps my mom yelled upstairs that John Lennon had just been shot. Howard Cosell had announced it on Monday Night Football.

I figured John had a gun and was cleaning it, and shot his toe. Maybe half an hour later, my mom announced that Howard Cosell had just stated that John Lennon was dead.

It was an odd thing to hear, especially when reading his words in Playboy at the same time. I was up all night waiting to hear that it was a mistake, that it was a hoax, that it was a promotional stunt to get some interest in their latest record.

Of course, that was not to be. My mother insisted I go to work the next day, and so I did, but I don’t recall getting much done since I kept breaking down in tears. John’s murder definitely affected me all through the course of my life.

Yes, it was selfish to know that the Beatles were never going to reunite now. But to have him brutally murdered on his front steps in front of his wife is truly disturbing.

45 years later, I am still haunted by this absolutely awful event.

And the 45 years that have passed, it’s been revealed that John was not perfect, that he had a lot of problems, and sometimes was a bit of an asshole. On social medi,a people sometimes point that out, and he slapped his first wife, Cynthia.

The thing is, people don’t realize that John had actually admitted that in interviews and that he had done his best to change and make himself better. That was the thing he admitted- he had problems, and he admitted that he had tried to change the situation that he was in; sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he did not, mostly he was just like everyone else.

I would have loved to have met him I identified with him so much, and really, perhaps it’s because we had the same first name same type of sense of humor, but I loved him, and I miss him.