Yoko Ono on John: 'We Were a Couple Who Laughed'

It's the 30th anniversary of the day John Lennon was gunned down in front of the Dakota, but today his widow's memory focuses upstairs, in their kitchen, in the middle of the night. He's making tea for them, gently teasing, "Yoko, Yoko, you’re supposed to first put the tea bags in, and then the hot water.” He "took the role of the tea maker, for being English," writes Yoko Ono in an op-ed for the New York Times.

It was a typical scene in what "neither of us knew...was to be the last year of our life together," she writes. John mentioned he'd been talking to an aunt, who told him it was water first, tea bags second. "So all this time we've been doing it wrong?" Ono asks. "Yeah," Lennon admits, prompting both to crack up. Writes Ono: "On this day, the day he was assassinated, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea. They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed." (More John Lennon stories.)