“Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast,” wrote Bob Dylan. “Oh but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last.”

As I get older, the concept of time passing just knocks me out, more than it ever did before. I find myself thinking about something that once happened to me – it could be as trivial as a song I heard on the radio, or a funny thing a buddy said to me – and I’ll realize it took place 25 or 30 years ago, a time when some of my co-workers weren’t even born yet.

Call it “the Middle Aged Blues.” Everyone gets ‘em, even if they don’t want to own up to it.

Which leads me to something that will be discussed a lot in the days ahead—the 30th anniversary of the first global news event that really gob-smacked me out of my slumber and unconsciousness as a suburban teenager: the assassination of John Lennon. For my generation, that was our Pearl Harbor-JFK-9/11 rolled up in one, with a Beatles anthem or two playing in the background.

Like a lot of things in life, it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t then, it doesn’t now.

And it still hurts.

It was my first real lesson in how unfair, brutal and patently ugly the world can be.

Here’s my rendition of where I was the day the music died. I was 18, in my freshman semester at UMBC. In the Randallstown garden apartment complex I lived in, I had a close friend named Stacey (a male, and a hunky Greek one to boot, with a thick, enviable mustache) who had gone off to college in Tennessee. He made me promise that I’d keep an eye on his longtime girlfriend and first true love, who was also going to UMBC.

She and I got to be good friends during that semester, and many were the nights that I’d listen to her rhapsodize over a beer about Stacey’s virtues and tell me how much she missed him. Frankly, it got a bit exhausting. But one night—around 9:30 on Dec. 8, 1980, to be fairly exact – she called me up, hysterical, crying, shrieking and beyond consolation. Stacey had called her earlier that evening to inform her that he was dumping her, he’d met a little Southern Belle hottie at his school. He was done with her, see ya babe.

Trying to be a good friend, I listened to her wail about how much she loved him and didn’t know if she could actually live without him. In my naivete (or stupidity), I even let her convince me to call him in Tennessee, to try to discern what exactly was going on down there and talk some good sense into him. He was mildly pleasant on the phone but didn’t really want to talk to me about the subject, just saying he’d met someone else and was happy and wished me well. (Turns out he dumped me that night, too.)

So I called back his UMBC girlfriend – strike that, now his ex-girlfriend – and told her I’d failed abysmally in my valiant effort to win him back for her. She commenced crying and whining incessantly again, but at one point a roommate of hers came over to her. “Alan,” she said, “hold on, something’s happened!” I heard them talking in the background and then she returned to the phone, to say, “Oh my God, Jack Lemmon’s been killed.” I was pretty stunned – why would anyone want to kill Jack Lemmon?!—and she said the news just came over the TV. Then, she went back to her weeping jag, for about an hour or two. (Seemed like an eternity.)

Next morning, I woke up, groggy and thinking about the star of “The Odd Couple,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Apartment” and so many other great films. Like I did every morning, I reflexively turned on the radio, to hear “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Then came on “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine” and “Give Peace A Chance.”

And then, suddenly, I got it – it wasn’t Jack Lemmon (who’d live for another 21 years, to age 76) who was killed.

It was John Lennon.

For me and my buddies back then, John was at the forefront of the generation we felt we’d missed out on and lived vicariously through. We felt cheated – born too damned late. We knew he’d just made a comeback album and was taking care of his kid for the last few years, a bit of a recluse while Yoko took care of the bills. But being big Beatles fans, he was never, ever far from our thoughts. We didn’t really care about New Wave or disco or any of that stuff. We knew better. We knew the good stuff – the stuff with some meaning, vitality and purpose—came before us.

That morning, driving to school, I actually saw people crying in their cars while on the highways. I knew they were listening to the same songs and news reports on the radio that I was hearing. It seemed like the whole world was coming unhinged, or at least it did in my feeble 18-year-old brain.

It didn’t make any sense and never will. I wanted someone to wake me up and tell me it was all a bad dream.

I still do.

Naturally, all of my teachers mentioned it that day during classes. I remember my Introduction to Theater teacher, Xerxes Mehta, a cousin of the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, saying to us, “Today is a very difficult day for artists everywhere. When something can happen to someone like John Lennon … what kind of world are we living in?”

And I recall coming home after school and driving directly to my friend Chris’ apartment building. He was the person who largely turned me on to the Beatles in my early teens (probably because he had about 16 older siblings and step-siblings), and he was the biggest Fab Four fan I knew. When I pulled up to the building, I spotted his old, black jalopy station wagon covered in signs with John’s photo – “Give Peace A Chance,” “John Lennon: 1940-1980,” “We Love You, John,” “All You Need Is Love.”

When he opened his apartment door, Chris looked at me woefully and could barely talk. He looked spent, like someone who was sitting shiva (even though he’s Catholic) and barely gestured for me to come in. We largely sat in silence, trying to make sense of it all in some way, lost in our thoughts. Maybe we were a bit melodramatic or maudlin in retrospect, but we knew the world would never be the same.

An hour or two later, I went home and saw my dad, who unbeknownst to me would die suddenly two years later, almost to the day. It was actually the day after his 58th birthday, but he was never one much for birthdays. I tried to explain to him why I was so distraught about John’s murder, but I don’t think he really got it. He didn’t know from Beatles. They were just bubblegum to him. He was a World War II vet and a hardworking electrician who didn’t really care about celebrities and pop culture. To him, it was silliness. He reminded me that I never actually met John Lennon.

He did, however, note that Mae West had died a couple of weeks earlier. “Who cares?” I snapped at him. “She was just an old lady. She didn’t move or inspire a generation. This was someone who got killed for no reason, a really talented person who changed the way people think, and really gave a damn about doing something to change this world. He was someone who worked so hard for peace and wound up getting shot in the back, just the Kennedys and Dr. King.”

When my rant was over, my father stared at me for a while. I think he was surprised by my passion and ardor. He knew this meant a lot to me. I could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to figure out what to say next.

“Well, that all may be true. No one deserves to get killed like your guy did,” he said, wearing a solemn expression. “But you should know that Mae West was built like a brick s—-house.”

That was my day when John Lennon died. Somehow, with his perverse and quirky sense of humor, I think John would’ve liked it.

But can it really be 30 years? Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast.