Meet the Beatles

If you could see the song, you would say it was shining.

February 1964

Getting home from church was an endurance game. Mom and Dad were capable of talking to nearly every person who had attended, and none of them it seemed were in any particular hurry to get home either. My sister and I would stand by one or the other while they ignored our most rueful gazes and our most audible sighs. Even when we asked directly if we could go home now, we would not get the hoped for answer; in fact we often were scolded for asking. Sometimes they would run out of steam on a given topic and then as if they had remembered all the whining from their ill behaved offspring, they would intentionally start in on something brand new. One Sunday though my sister, Shamera, came up with a second best alternative. We would wait in the car. She would take the place of Charles, our older brother who had moved out but left behind a legacy of never waiting for them but instead sulkily going directly to the car, hoping they’d get the hint.
Waiting in the ’55 Fairlane involved figuring out how many different ways I could be in the car without actually sitting on the seat in a conventional fashion. I was so small I could fit in the space above the backseat under the rear windshield. I could even fit in on the floor of the car in the backseat on either side of the transmission hump. Another favorite was with my head hanging over the edge of the seat with my feet and legs where you would normally have your back. A car looked more interesting from this perspective because it didn’t look like a car; it looked like a complicated box or a barn. Then there was the matter of the blood gathering in my head. I had tried all the usual positions on that day in March, and Mom and Dad were still chatting it up with folks. I didn’t even want to look out the window and see the mostly empty parking lot. I stayed in my upside down state, feeling the blood gathering in my head making me feel as if I were both getting mad and catching a cold. I righted myself and saw that Shamera was listening to her transistor radio, which she had received for Christmas. I had put an Ed “Big Daddy” Roth decal of one of his drag car racing monsters on the side of the radio. She was mad at first, but she didn’t take it off. I thought I had helped her make her radio look cool. The radio was pressed against her head, and was nodding in affirmation. I heard a song that I couldn’t quite place. It was bouncy and happy but not sappy. If you could see the song, you would say it was shining.
“What is it?” I asked, falling into the music somehow.
“It’s the Beatles, you idiot,” she snorted with contempt.
I didn’t hear her anymore. I listened to “She loves you” like I had listened to no other song. There was something to it. It was not just different, it was full of confidence. Shamera and I had watched them on the Ed Sullivan Show the month before but I just didn’t get it that night somehow. But now in the car on the transistor with the decal, I did. Eventually, everybody our age had the story of when they first heard the Beatles. First hearing the Beatles stories are second only to where were you when Kennedy was shot stories, and eventually they were just slightly ahead of where were you when they first landed on the moon stories. I don’t remember anything else from that day. I remember their final “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” of that song though. It was as if they had even invented new notes. In a way, they did.