Chapter XXII: Starting Over

Chapter Twenty-Two: Starting Over

The next day was Dec 8^th. My long and winding road seemed to be just beginning in early December 1991, but John Lennon's road had ended eleven years earlier. To memorialize John Lennon’s day of deliverance, I cancelled all my appointments and set back to play his songs on my dad's record player. I do this every December 8^th. It is the least I can do.

The second song I ever remember hearing was “Day in the life” My father borrowed records from the public library to listen to in his attic apartment in Lexington, MA. on a record player he bought at the Salvation Army following my mother's decampment. The year was 1979 and for the next decade I thought The Orange Album collection (1967-1970) by The Beatles was a studio album, something they just put together for the Holidays. I thought it was a damn good studio album.

On weekends, my brother and I would visit the old man to walk in the park, fly kites, play catch or canoe on one of the nearby creeks. We once watched volunteers re-enact the battle of Lexington on the public Common where couples ordinarily picnic. The two sides, the Red Coast and the Minutemen, approached each other. Words were shouted. Then came the shot that started the revolution. Paul Revere played some important role in all this but I guess you can look it up in a book. The important thing was that as gun powder filled the sky I wondered why the soldiers didn't just hide behind that cement monument there in the center of the green lawn. At least they should have lain flat on the ground. Even the kids who played Ghost Tag in the Ironbury Cemetery knew that much about strategy. Then we walked back to my Dad's attic apartment and put a frozen pizza in the oven and listened to The Red Album while the pizza burned. I always thought, “A Day in the Life” was how I felt every day: I woke up, got out of bed, and the next thing I knew I was in a 2^nd grade classroom at Carr School being lectured on correct margins. Then the song morBHHS into something different and my life felt like that too.

Years later I became a born again Beatles fan, 25 years too late, a revived hippie spinning The White Album and talking about how great it would have been to drop out and tune into the energy when the Beatles rocked Frisco or Madison Square Garden. To watch old John Boy strumming some chords would have been...but hell, that’s just living in the past. So I took December 8^th off to worship a strong souled, long haired saint who took the bullet for America and ended up with his blood washed down a N.Y. storm drain.

I knew every word to “A day in the life” by the time I moved back to Bone Harbor. My father played the Let it Be 8-track cassette in his '75 Volvo on our trips to family counseling, where my brother would beat on the couch and yell, “There is nothing wrong with me. Why can't you understand that?” while I played with a set of metal hoops.

These solemn drives were my only exposure to my Father and Mother's music. They played Disc Jockey with a box of tapes while my brother and I read comic books in the back seat. Until my brother turned 13 and I was given his radio/turntable, there was no music other than The Carpenters, Cat Stevens, John Denver, Jim Croce, Harry Chapin, Gordon Lightfoot and the Beatles. These were the 8-track tapes my parents had had in our first home in Maine and they became the cassette tapes they purchased individually when they separated. Apparently, my parents had not been aware that there was a rock and roll revolution taking place while they were attending college in Queensland. When asked, they had never heard of The Who or The Rolling Stones or even The Beach Boys. Motown was where cars were manufactured. The Doors were things you opened and closed. If an album had more instruments than a singer and a guitar, then it was generally regarded with suspicion. Only The Beatles managed to meet their approval. While their generation had The Beach Boys, I had Bon Jovi. They had the Carpenters and I had Vanessa Williams. They had The Rolling Stones and I had...The Rolling Stones.

Maybe I like John's music because I never had the chance to know him while he was alive. As far as I was concerned he had lived in another century because I first heard his rhythm guitar in old songs. He had left his mark and had taken a final exit before I knew he existed, so he was frozen. He couldn’t grow older; he couldn’t write bad songs; his voice couldn’t crack and his skin couldn’t wrinkle; he couldn’t get sucked into a drug scandal or sing a verse of “We are the World”; he couldn't go on a Beatles Reunion Tour; he couldn’t live to sell his songs to a company to sell basketball sneakers. John Lennon is a memory preserved on records and tapes, a ghost walking barefoot in the street, a longhaired peace symbol, a bard in granny glasses. I knew John Lennon only as an old picture. His history had been written and it was up to me to find what it meant. So every Dec 8^th I give peace a chance because that is what John asked me to do. And I imagine a world with John Lennon still in it, singing, singing in front of a white piano.

When the sun fell again over Leary field I took Shaved Fish off the record player. I held it carefully and delicately put it back in its torn plastic sleeve. My grip on the Present had grown weak during my travels to Strawberry Fields, so I had to check the answering machine clock to find out what day it was.. Fortunately, Vance called before my dad could get home.