the beatles at 13

just in case anyone ever wanted to know ...
my favorite beatles song is "i've just seen a face"
there are others i love...
"blackbird", "paperback writer", "the long and winding road"

i'm really too young to be a 'back in the day' beatles fan, but something happened way back when to make me one. john lennon was assassinated when i was 13. so at 13, in 1980, i discovered the beatles, like a million 13 year old girls before, the only difference was the catalyst.

i have beautiful volumes of expensive coffee table memorabilia books packed away in airtight containers downstairs, gifts from someone of very long ago. gifts from my birthday at 13. i seem to remember everything about the year of 13.

it was at 13 i first developed the tendencies of a stalker.

i had this mad crush on this man that worked with my parents at the bakery. we spent all the long hot nights of 13 working together in the bakery that summer. he was 26, and i was desperately in love with him and convinced that our life long relationship could work despite a 13 year age difference. i mean, afterall, when i was 26 he would be 39... and that would be okay, wouldn't it ? i think i even asked him that on the night that he broke my 13 year old heart. he was a good guy, a nice decent guy, a good catholic boy who had turned away from the seminary in his last year. and he was wildly handsome and so smart and funny that in my 13 year old brain he became the ideal of romantic and courtly love. so he did the right thing, and told my parents about my crush and let me down easy, and it was all supposed to be a 1950's tv show ending ...

but instead...

i was obsessed by him even after
and i was still madly in love with him and convinced that he would someday regret his decision to cast me aside because i was so young, that someday he would regret the loss of a love so pure and good. and so i did what any budding stalker does... i called him every year on his birthday, to tell him happy birthday, and to remind him that i loved him and that he had thrown away a love so pure and true. this went on for 4 years.

i even went to see him one last time, at his very own bakery where he had set up shop. i was out on a date with this guy i had been seeing and we decided to go in. i guess it was my final way to either say good bye to it or to rub his nose in the fact that he couldn't have me (in my own warped and twisted way)

so i guess i have been a stalker.
though i was an innocent teenage one.

it's a story i've never written down or admitted to anyone. i'm not necessarily proud of it, but i'm not necessarily ashamed of it either. i did what i did. i had my first real crush and got my heart broken for the first real time. and in the process i guess i went a little crazy. i probably should have known then that something in my head wasn't quite right but then again, living with my family in the life i led, how could anybody tell?

but what started all this was my favorite beatles song ...
and i how discovered the beatles...
it was because of him. he's the one who taught me that summer who the beatles were and got me started on the road to discovering their music. all those late nights into the dawn that we worked together the oldies station would play their songs and i would listen over and over and over again to the lyrics. people wonder where i get my knowledge of oldies music ... now they know.

and it's funny too, i don't think of him when i hear the beatles...
instead when i hear "i've just seen a face" i close my eyes and i don't see a thing but the music ... and all i feel is happy inside.