November was cold that year. I dreamed of a blue snow closing around me like a fist. I was 12 and had few friends; I wore tragically misguided clothes, avoided the eyes of boys, told exorbitant lies. On Tuesday afternoons, I walked from the middle school to my grandmother's house in town, so she could give me piano lessons. I lived for those days, for the regal piano with its dusty runner and arrangements of cloth flowers, for the world she would build up around us —
I used to go to Woody's Nook, to dance until three in the morning — I'll take you there sometime; you'll see, it's still the same. Now, tell me about all of the parties you've been going to. She never seemed to notice I went nowhere, lisped, had buckteeth. A bird alighted in the rose bushes and she pointed — Look, she said, he's landed there for us.
One Tuesday, just before Thanksgiving, I arrived at my grandmother's house. The door was unlocked but no one was home; I let myself into the eerie quiet. I had never been forgotten before. I sat at the piano and practiced "To a Wild Rose." Three hours later, my father arrived at the house. I don't remember him telling me that she had died, only the time after, when I knew. I watched my fingers from a distance, fanned out on the cold piano keys. The house was all around me, cigarette smoke and dust, stacks of celebrity biographies already overdue at the library — it felt terrible, to be in the litter of her life, to know that it was only that. I kept sitting at the piano. I waited until my father helped me up and drove me home.
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At the funeral, the smell of rain mixed with the dense perfume of a dozen bouquets. They buried her ashes in a cedar box. The cool damp grass was pulled like a blanket to the lip of the square grave. That night I sat on the edge of my bed, with a photograph in my lap. My father had built the bed from plywood, with handmade slats that slipped out in the night and clattered to the ground. The photograph was a print of the Annie Leibovitz shot — Yoko fully clothed, John wrapped naked around her. I walled up the terrible loneliness of my grandmother. I couldn't look at it, so I looked at the photograph instead. I stopped crying. I recognized something, and looked closer. Like seeing my own face, I knew. How had I not seen it before? I was him. He was me. I turned the idea over in my mind, something bright and important. I am the reincarnation of John Lennon, I thought.
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The corner of Washington where I grew up was an old railroad stop. The things that marked my childhood were without event or time — the shingle that hung from the corner of the woodshed, the creek strung with skunk cabbage, the scrub lawn, the tumbling ruts, the loose rocks that tore out of the roads when we drove in the truck too fast toward home. I lived with my parents and brother 20 miles out of town. I was ashamed of what I perceived as our provincialism. We're the country cousins! mother liked to say, but I just saw the burning barrel, the shabby dogs, the abandoned duck pen. The dogs gave us fleas and we had to fumigate the house; when we went back inside, the fogged faces of the clocks looked dangerous.
In the weeks following my grandmother's funeral, I spent more and more time alone. I know you miss your grandmother, my mother said. You have to talk about this. Do we need to take you to see someone? I didn't want to talk to anyone. I hadn't even talked about my life to my grandmother. That was just it — she peered into my future, but into a future she had created, where I was beautiful, where the difference in me was patched over with ragtime hits and a vision of what my haircut would look like: It will be flipped out on the ends, my grandmother said. You'll even iron it, and then use a roller to make the ends flip out. I liked the way she saw my future, how it slid into place like a slide in a viewing machine and encompassed everything. If she saw me one way, then that was who I would be. Without her there to cast that spell, winter spun around me, so empty it felt solid.
To distract myself, I thought of my former life as John Lennon. Being John had its own rituals, and I tried to fill the days with them. There was a shed behind my parents' house — there were several sheds, actually, because that is the way it works in rural Washington; you build a shed for garbage and another for animal feed, and one for firewood, and the rabbit hutch, and the tools — and in the back, near the edge of the property line, there is one with a collapsing roof where you can keep your solemn vigil. It smelled like the inside of a Greek church. I hung curtains and nailed scraps of salvaged carpet to the plywood floor.
Over and over, I listened to a cassette tape — the Beatles, 1963, the Royal Variety. It had been taped from another recording, and the sound was far off, like it was coming from deep in a well. John cries, Those in the cheaper seats clap! The rest of you rattle your jewelry. I burned a candle in front of the photograph of John and Yoko. I carefully mapped my connection to John on butcher paper that I kept hidden in the shed. He had died in 1980; I must have lived for a brief while in between his life and my own — a child who had died at two years old. I felt a deep sadness when I thought of that little in-between life, that baby who had never been. I lay on the carpet scraps with my eyes closed and willed myself not to think of anything, just to be — to be that baby, to be John Lennon. I preferred being John. The baby, when I tried to imagine being it, was colicky and discontent. Instead I imagined Yoko on a bed in the studio where I worked, my son Julian asleep across the room. There I am, wearing a white dashiki — and there, at Yoko's bedside — and there, in front of a crowd, my head feels light, the cameras — And then later, Yoko and I climbing from the limousine out onto 72nd Street, the shout — Mr. Lennon! — and Mark David Chapman, with an autographed album copy from hours before in his hand, and a .38 — twice in the back, twice in the shoulder, once through the window above my head. I let the images wash over me and I was for a moment so far from my own small sorrow. I was something so much more than myself.
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I was talking with a friend recently, and we started to tumble down that old rabbit hole: Life is just pain, isn't it? We're born to suffer. We walk forward and things are taken from us and then we die. I'm too sensitive to discount that feeling completely, but neither can I discount our desire to live, to feel.
I don't remember how I stopped believing that I was John Lennon. Only that the conviction slipped away. I kept the memory of my grandmother as something important and beautiful, but over time she ceased to eclipse the live and waiting world around me. I finished junior high, muddled through high school, moved away. Without my noticing, the thought of being John Lennon's reincarnation became ridiculous and eventually faded away entirely.
What didn't fade was my desire to slip from one life to another — an escape from pain, but also a way to feel connected, to feel