BROOKLYN @ 25

[XMASTIME NOTE] I moved to Brooklyn 25 years ago this past January; throughout the year I'll be noting things, no matter how small they are in reality, that I remember & associate with those first few days/weeks/months of living in the greatest city in the world.

Linda McCartney died 25 years ago today. I'm not gonna pretend I really knew a ton about her other than her being Paul McCartneys wife (and the unfortunate target of assholes like Howard Stern making fun of her singing as a member of Wings), but even then we all knew how crazy it was that their marriage lasted almost 30 years, and surely would have gone another 25+ if she'd lived. She married the world's most eligible bachelor when he was only 27, and according to Paul they spent exactly one night apart (the only thing that kept them apart was apparently a prison in Japan). And those of us who loved him so much also noted with a grimace that she died of the same disease as his mother did when he was only 14. 

I have a picture in my head (where else would it be) of being in a restaurant/cafe thingee reading about her death in my beloved Daily News, but I can't for the life of me remember which place I was at. Ah well. And of course now all I can think of is how crazy it is that she was only 57 when she died. I'm sure at the time I thought she was about 100 years old, but I guess any of us lucky enough to keep going in this life know how that feels. 

On January 1, 1998 my buddy Ryan and I packed ourselves into my Jeep Cherokee along with everything I owned in the whole world (which consisted solely of hundreds of books and multiple copies of every Ramones record) and drove three hundred and eleven miles from Tappahannock, Virginia to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where, after Ryan drove my Jeep back to Virginia, I'd begin a new life that would stretch over the next fifteen years. I still miss it every day.