Back to Black (and White)

With my Thelma and Louise out on a rainy Saturday afternoon (rain in April in Connecticut; brace for flowers in May, I guess), I hunted. Don't need a license or a long bow as I use a remote and a proven method, from the lower numbers to the higher numbers. I never go down the dial (though technically there is no dial at all). I am a creature of habit. I eat my peas with honey, I've done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.

I'm closing in on my 57th birthday and fear those pony rides are no more coming to fruition than that call from the Yankees to plug a hole in their pitching rotation is on the horizon. I'm too old to make the grade as an astronaut and that means my big plan of being the President of the United States and walking on the moon in the same summer is undoubtedly toast.

While out walking yesterday (you remember Friday-it was the nice day in the month of April) I encountered the former mayor of Norwich, the Honorable Art Lathrop (it's really Arthur, but I cannot imagine me calling him that much less him looking at me like I was nuts), who was, himself, out for a walk and kind enough to share the way for awhile. He hadn't seen me in quite some time, but was still very much a good sport about having his luck run out, though he did express surprise at 'look at how grey you've gotten.' I was tempted to suggest he should see from the inside but let it pass.

Hunting or channel surfing today I came across the Independent Film Channel, IFC (the things you see when you haven't got your gun) which surprised me as I didn't know we even had that channel. I suppose we should start drinking imported bottled water now in cut crystal glasses (or perhaps we could still drink domestic water if we used imported bubbles) where I surprised my twelve-year old self.

On IFC, gloriously restored both frame by frame and also across the entire audio spectrum, was The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" and the decades slipped away as quickly as the greatest chord in all of rock and roll, that kicked off the title track, still echoed in the living room and in my heart and head. Wow! I looked around as the movie played, at the things I've acquired and the people I've become in all the years since first hearing my first Beatles' record and it's true you can't step into the same river twice, but you can remember and relive it if you're lucky and I am in a way, I guess.

I didn't have older brothers or sisters--and my parents led lives that seemed to us as we grew up in their house to not have very much to do with us. I was a born early in the I Like Ike era, within a decade of the end of World War II, as the cease-fire in Korea was just starting and as our parents were just beginning to confront the outlines of what would become our modern world.

My parents didn't listen to the pop music that had come before The Beatles, at least I don't remember hearing it. There was Percy Faith, Nat King Cole and Mantovani and on TV there was Sing Along with Mitch. My parents enjoyed Broadway musicals and the stereo (a giant piece of wooden furniture with a Garrard turntable a combination tuner and amp with two three-inch speakers buried on opposite ends of the cabinet) played a steady stream of Pajama Game, The King and I, Oklahoma and many others.

I think I discovered The Beatles through classmates-since I don't recall the radio in the house or in the car ever having a lot to do with music. All there was, back then as I recall it, was AM radio. As I learned years later, there were stations on the AM band that, at night, you could tune from almost halfway across the country on transistor radios with a skinny white wire one-piece ear-phone that you stuck in one ear and that fell out when you finally dozed off. All those radios ran on nine volt batteries that cost a week's worth of allowance at a time, so radio listening became a rationed luxury.

I discovered yesterday afternoon I didn't have as much I remembered in common with Twelve Year Old Me, TYOM, but the music sure was great. I wasn't surprised to see the Fab Four as they had been, not as they became or in the case of two of them, how they died, because I think a lot of us who grew up with them still don't ourselves as almost fifty-seven year olds, but rather as a twelve year old waiting for the rain to stop so we can go outside and play catch with Neil and Bobby F. Sure hope that pony gets here soon.
-bill kenny