Our life's milestone markers go from the most serious-Where were you when the second tower collapsed?-to the more specialized and trivial-Where were you when the Sox finally won The World Series? Our parents' generation had the Kennedy assassination, "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," Ali/Frazier; our grandparents-Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Black Friday
Though not the defining event of my lifetime, nor my generation's, I do remember very well the shock of the death of Tupac Shakur.
Amazing. Amazing to me that yesterday marked the fifteenth anniversary of his death. My students wear t-shirts with his face and the line THUG LIFE in Olde English writing, and they talk about him as a hero of "old school" hip hop. It came to me yesterday that my students were born in 1996, the year he was born. A few of them-the late birthdays-were not even alive at the same time as him. Wow.
Tupac has been dead for about half of my life.
I feel old.
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