Every knitter, I'm sure, has experience that strange sensation of knitting one's memories into a project, so that for long afterwards the garment brings back the time and place, what one was doing as the stitches moved along. This happens with all needlework, I expect -- and this little piece seems to me now evocative of both our summer road trip, the hot sun in the canyons of Mesa Verde and the amazing steam-train ride along the Las Animas River between Durango and Silverton, and of more recent days, the last heat wave of summer.
I've been introducing Laura to the Beatles this month. We had taken on our car trip a two-disc set of British Invasion bands -- the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Merseybeats -- and I was pleased to find that both girls liked it enormously. This has long been one of my favorite periods of music -- something about the cheerfulness of it, I think. But before this it was the Beatles.
The first time I saw or heard them was I think seeing "Help!" on television one afternoon -- maybe I was just barely in high school. I thought they were funny, and appealing, and I loved the music. My youngest aunt, who being only a little over a decade older than me had gone through the Beatlemania days first-hand, gave me her Beatles records, generously (actually, one of them was her by-then-ex-husband’s, I remember seeing his name written in pencil across the top of one of them) -- "Yesterday and Today", "Magical Mystery Tour", and "Sgt. Pepper". I think "Help!" was the first one I bought with my own money.
This was the days before the internet, of course, even before home video, so I remember that it was years before I got to see "A Hard Day’s Night", like some holy grail of Beatlemania. We had a massive Tower Records not far from our house, and I would walk over there and look through the bin or, more thrillingly, the import section, with the Parlophone versions that had the line-ups the way the Beatles wanted them, which (purist that I am still) I craved. Ringo was my favorite at the beginning, but I liked each one of them best at various times, recognizing even then, I guess, the individual dynamics that went into making the band more than the sum of its already pretty impressive parts.
Those were the days that all of the Beatles books were always missing from the public library. Now you can find tons of stuff on the internet -- I think I've never seen any of these photos before, for instance. I thought it was pretty funny, considering, that I saw a new book at the library the other day, Larry Kane's When They Were Boys, about the "early days" up to 1964 or thereabouts. This being actually my favorite of the Beatles' eras, I brought it home and started to read it that day. I must admit that the writing style sets my teeth on edge sometimes -- he's got ostensibly only about five years to cover, but he jumps around constantly, restlessly, for instance talking at length about Stu Sutcliffe's death and its effect on John and the others, then back a bit to the Hamburg days, all before Stu is even properly introduced. He also has a rather annoying habit of putting the longer quotes in full caps -- one of them goes on for literally pages -- and starts the various sections with a sort of poetic mood-piece that just makes me go, "Huh?" -- "On January 1, 1963, Astrid Kirchherr was alone in her solace, the Sutcliffe family longed for Stuart, and fans in Hamburg recollected the sweet and sometimes high-pitched tones of the boy singing 'Love Me Tender,' the boy whose face could light up the night". And I've never read an author who mentions his own name as much as this guy -- "Well, you know, Larry--" "As it happens, Larry--" "I'm telling you, Larry--" But -- on the other hand, the stories about the boys in the early days, those mostly-innocent days, from not just Larry's own travels with them, but from almost everyone around them, family and friends and people who worked with them and helped in one way or another to set them on the road to the top -- well ...
Still, the best thing is still the music. We are all walking around humming "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Ticket to Ride" and "Love Me Do" and "Tell Me Why" and "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" and "I'll Cry Instead", and my little Navajo-style miniature carpet seems infused with it all, in the best possible way.
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