I was eleven when I became aware of the Beatles: “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There”. Those were the first 45’s I bought for my portable record player. After school on Fridays, I’d have my girlfriends over. We’d “Twist and Shout” in my bedroom until we were out of breath and flopped down, exhausted, on my pink bedspread. As the years went by, I became attached to Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and Grace Slick. But the Beatles were always the background music at each pivotal juncture in my life.
When I was in eighth grade, the Beatles toured America. My sister had a schoolmate who stalked them in their Boston hotel, and insisted that she made tea with an actual teabag they had used. “I have George’s cold!” She boasted. My father was neither impressed with her antics nor trusting of the shrieking mobs of hysterical female fans. My sister and I weren’t allowed to see the Beatles at the Garden on our own. Instead, we attended the concert on a family field trip that included both of our parents and our younger brother. At thirteen, I wasn’t embarrassed to be with them, just excitedly screaming along with everyone else when the four guys took the stage. The audience was singing and yelling so loudly, that the commotion sounded like a jet landing at Logan. It was difficult to hear the lyrics, but we were there and we were close.
In high school, “She’s Leaving Home” became my personal mantra as I prepared myself mentally to leave home for college, and explored my beliefs. I remember writing an essay about reincarnation in which I talked about an afterlife and wondered if I had been a frog earlier in my history. Citing my writing as a fantastic piece of satire, my English teacher read it aloud to the class. (She just didn’t get it.)
Lennon and McCartney wrote poetry that chronicled the emotions of people like me coming of age in the late 60’s and early 70’s. “Eleanor Rigby” and “Day In The Life” encouraged wallowing in adolescent melancholia. “Good Day, Sunshine” and “The Magical Mystery Door” were expressions of exuberant joy. Who could take a Saturday afternoon drive and not smile if you were blasting one of those tunes on your mother’s car radio?
The September I arrived at college “Here Comes The Sun” and “Give Peace A Chance” blared from dorm room speakers. You could hear those songs clear across the quad. After the Beatles broke apart, John Lennon’s personal commitment to peace fueled the antiwar movement. The rallies and marches that I attended featured his words. Years later with “Imagine”, Lennon was still pleading for a perfect world.
On December 8th when John Lennon was shot, I was holding my own beautiful boy, my toddler son who had awakened from a bad dream and crawled into bed with me. I inhaled his baby fresh scent while I ran my fingers through his thick brown curls. When the terrible news flashed across my television screen, I was stunned. My husband, who had been practicing his guitar, came into our bedroom to be with me. Our eyes locked in sad silence. As children, we had experienced the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. We were shocked that this could happen again to a figure who loomed so large in our lives. Now the man who was home “Watching The Wheels” just as we were and extolling his son in “Beautiful Boy” just as we were completely involved with raising our own kids was inexplicably, violently dead. At that moment, it was too overpowering to digest. The next day I dressed in black, and walked around in a daze.
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