I read the news today, oh boy. John Lennon died and I was asleep

I missed the news that night as I fell asleep early. At five o'clock the following morning, a friend called and woke me up. She thought I'd be up anyway since I had an early class to teach. The combination of the news and my state of being barely awake threw me into an alternative, hypnotic state of reality.  I made it to class, I don't remember getting on the subway, don't recall going to the classroom, nodded to my students as they came in and asked them to just be quiet. Normally they were anyway.  It was a writing class so I told them to write for the next fifty minutes anything that they wanted and I sat there at the head of the class, containing my tears and wrote a long sappy, rambling encomium, one that I have read every anniversary.