Did You Hear the News?

Yesterday when Dan was coming home from school, he was stopped by an older black lady on the street. "Is it true?" she asked. "Is Michael Jackson really dead?" Her voice was breaking. "My daughter just called me and told me he died, and I just can't believe it!" Dan hadn't heard. "I've actually been out of the loop for a while, so I haven't heard anything about it," he said. (Poor Dan had just finished a writing competition for Law Review. He'd had like 4 hours of sleep in the past two days.) Later when I was at the grocery store, the cashier asked me, "Did you hear the news? It's so sad I don't want to be the one to tell you. It's Michael Jackson. He died." I hadn't heard either. "His funeral is going to be bigger than Obama's inauguration!" She said. Dan and I were both a bit surprised how both these people were so sad about it. Since then we've heard many people on the street bemoaning the death. We thought Jackson had fallen out of favor in the past few years. I figure that most of his good music was done before he was fifteen years old, so the music industry didn't suffer a huge loss. But yeah, apparently death makes everyone forget your flaws. I guess that's a good thing. RIP, M.J.