Sorry girls - he's dead!

So, I was driving yesterday, keeping up w/ the traffic out on I-70 between here & St. Louis, listening to a reading of The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. I was finding a place to park not so very far away at all from the white tents, folding chairs, and meanderers, signifying Clayton's Big Read. Ah, just the place for someone such as I, a tried & true author/illustrator in the old age of her youth, in the childhood of her old age. Walking about, watching a tentful of attendees, there to cheer their young, school-age authors, LEAVE the tent as I was preparing to speak - about what? a book I did back when Bill Clinton was in office. They're Off! The Story of the Pony Express. In the course of a 1/2 hour of VERY lively talking on my part, a few people, on their part, came to listen. Maybe seven, bless 'em. Vaudeville lives. I signed a book and drove home, listening to W. S. M.'s continuing tale of T. P. Veil, the plot of which was significantly changed in the very swell movie by the same name and all the while, shadowed over the entire day & all that happened and did not happen was the knowledge that the day might have been the day when old Boomers such as I would have been marveling that half of the Fab 4 is 70 - can you believe it? John and Ringo are 70 – go figure! But no, the one is still here, and the other was murdered - neither fact changing the fact that the Beatles will always be. don't mean to be such an old dork, but they meant EVERYTHING to my long-gone [gods be thanked] 13-year-old self and to the subsequent various versions . ..

was it a bad day, yesterday, an unusually bad day at Attica for Mark David Chapman, I wonder?