Never got a chance to grow up

Imagine a world in which Central Park’s Strawberry Fields had no reason to exist. (Image by anastaciaknits0)

As an adolescent, I adored the Beatles, individually and collectively.

A proper obsession began around the time I was twelve. Fortunately, we had crates full of old LPs and a bunch of books that allowed me to become a scholar of Beatles music and lore by the age of fourteen. I learned the story from start to finish, like a fairy tale.

But though there was a romantic beginning, full of ambition and beautiful leather-clad musicians and artists in seedy Hamburg rock clubs, there was no happy ending. Lawyers and acrimony…and later, a gunshot. Forty years ago today, in fact.

I grieved that moment over and over. Paging through the books, I wanted to go around it somehow, find a different outcome. There was no way I could make sense of the senseless.

I went back to the music, in which I found endless depths. The charming “she loves me and I love her” early originals mixed in with the boys’ earnest attempts to emulate their American heroes, from Chuck Berry to the Marvelettes; the failed attempts to mimic Dylan that landed the band somewhere equally interesting; the psychedelic aural landscapes; the gritty rock; the stripped down intensity of Plastic Ono Band along with the rest of the solo catalogs. I couldn’t stop listening.

In the process, I tried to figure out who these people were. It was a strange thing to age past them — to hit thirty and realize that I was now older than the Beatles were when they made Abbey Road. And at a certain point, I started to realize that John Lennon — brilliant, acerbic, mercurial John Lennon — was a bit of an asshole.

He was prone to rage and jealousy. He mistreated women. He made anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks. He could be dismissive and vindictive. It was hard to reconcile those truths with the music I loved.

And then I aged past John completely. He would have been eighty this year, but he will never see forty-one. And I started to see him differently once again. I can’t imagine the pain of being abandoned by both of my parents, the unspeakable stress of becoming trapped by incredible fame before the age of twenty-five, the confusion and loneliness of that level of success for someone who didn’t have a lot of great emotional tools for dealing with it.

Such circumstances don’t excuse bad behavior, but they do offer a context for it. And as old as John Lennon seemed to me at the time of his death, I have since realized that he wasn’t. And like Marilyn, Elvis, Princess Diana, and so many others, he’ll never get a chance to grow up. He’ll never get a chance to make sense of his own story — to make the apologies, set things right, figure stuff out, and heal.

At times, it’s felt as though I’ve grown up incredibly slowly. I’ve made embarrassing mistakes in my personal and professional life that felt insurmountable at the time. I am grateful that I was able to get past them and not be defined by them. Why? Only because I managed to stay alive.

I do not have the kind of artistic legacy that Lennon has, so my choices haven’t been scrutinized. I can be an idiot in obscurity, and I also have time on my side. That gives me a lot more compassion for his missteps and mess-ups.

It’s so easy, when you’re young, to think that everything is going to work out for you. You can look at the older generation and roll your eyes and say you’ll never end up like them. You’ll never get addicted to drugs or marry the wrong person or get fired or yell at your kids. You’ll never be old and out of touch.

Well, as Lennon himself sang (although he stole it from somewhere), “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Things don’t always go exactly as we hoped. But getting old isn’t so bad. It does give you a chance to get some perspective and realize that maybe you didn’t know everything when you were younger.

I’d like to think that Lennon would have grown wiser as he grew older, had he had the chance. He would have reconciled with Paul, written some beautiful and heartfelt songs, and maybe even returned to England. We’ll never know. But I do know that having time is a gift, and we never know how much we’re going to get. I’ll use mine as best I can, just as John Lennon did. He gave us some moments that were transcendently perfect — it’s okay if not every moment was.