Read Online Looking Back by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joyce Maynard
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settled in my head, I would have jumped over the balcony or set fire to my treasured purple concertgoing coat, I think, if he’d asked me to.
I was eight when Joan Baez entered our lives, with long black beatnik hair and a dress made out of a burlap bag. When we got her first record (we called her Joan Baze then—soon she was simply Joan) we listened all day, to “All My Trials” and “Silver Dagger” and “Wildwood Flower.” My sister grew her hair and started wearing sandals, making pilgrimages to Harvard Square. I took up the guitar. We loved her voice and her songs but, even more, we loved the idea of Joan, like the fifteenth-century Girl of Orléans, burning at society’s stake, marching alone or singing, solitary, in a prison cell to protest segregation. She was the champion of nonconformity and so—like thousands of others—we joined the masses of her fans …
Somehow I could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. I knew she must but she was too cool and poised and perfect. We had a book about her, filled with color pictures of Jackie painting in a spotless yellow linen dress, Jackie on the beach with Caroline and John-John, Jackie riding elephants in India and Jackie, in a long white gown, greeting Khrushchev like Snow White welcoming one of the seven dwarfs. (No, I wasn’t betraying Joan in my adoration. Joan was beautiful but human, like us; Jackie was magic.) When, years later, she married Rumpelstiltskin, I felt like a child discovering, in his father’s drawer, the Santa Claus suit. And, later still, reading some Ladies Home Journal exposé (“Jacqueline Onassis’ secretary tells all …”) I felt almost sick. After the first few pages I put the magazine down. I wasn’t interested in the fragments, only in the fact that the glass had broken …
I can remember—just barely—a time when I didn’t know who the Beatles were. People my age are about the last generation who can say that—for the ones who were nine or ten instead of twelve when the Beatles burst into our consciousness, it must seem as if they have always been a part of life. We were in fifth grade when they first sang on the Ed Sullivan show to an audience that screamed so loud we scarcely heard them. I had no desire to scream or cry or throw jelly beans; an eighth grader would have been old enough to revert to childhood, but I was too young to act anything but old. Still, I remember that wonderful, shivery moment when I first experienced “I wanna hold your hand,” and it seemed as if a new color had been invented.
Because I can remember life without the Beatles and because it seems we aged together, I feel proprietary about them, when I see the new young crop of fans playing those first albums or, worse, abandoning them for weaker imitations. I feel a little weary too; how could I begin to explain what we’ve been through, John and Paul and Ringo and George and I: Liverpool accents and “A Hard Day’s Night” and Cynthia and Jane Asher and a reporter asking “What do you call your haircut?” and George saying “Arthur” and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ravi Shankar and Yellow Submarine and things not sounding as pretty as they used to, and Yoko—like a bad taste in the mouth—and Paul leaving and suing, and breaking up finally, which freed us to love them again, as the death of a senile grandparent frees the good memories.
The Beatles gave us something more than music. Quite a lot, I think. For one thing, they made kids part of history-journalistic history, at any rate. Through the Beatles’ existence we held some sort of control, we could act. Their appearance gave us our first sense of youth as a power—one that could hold moratoriums and keep LBJ from seeking re-election and raise a couple of million dollars for Bangladesh, without depending on grown-ups for anything. For that—for the fame they gave us—we gave fame back to them.
My love for the Beatles at ten or eleven was, I think, a pure,
I was eight when Joan Baez entered our lives, with long black beatnik hair and a dress made out of a burlap bag. When we got her first record (we called her Joan Baze then—soon she was simply Joan) we listened all day, to “All My Trials” and “Silver Dagger” and “Wildwood Flower.” My sister grew her hair and started wearing sandals, making pilgrimages to Harvard Square. I took up the guitar. We loved her voice and her songs but, even more, we loved the idea of Joan, like the fifteenth-century Girl of Orléans, burning at society’s stake, marching alone or singing, solitary, in a prison cell to protest segregation. She was the champion of nonconformity and so—like thousands of others—we joined the masses of her fans …
Somehow I could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. I knew she must but she was too cool and poised and perfect. We had a book about her, filled with color pictures of Jackie painting in a spotless yellow linen dress, Jackie on the beach with Caroline and John-John, Jackie riding elephants in India and Jackie, in a long white gown, greeting Khrushchev like Snow White welcoming one of the seven dwarfs. (No, I wasn’t betraying Joan in my adoration. Joan was beautiful but human, like us; Jackie was magic.) When, years later, she married Rumpelstiltskin, I felt like a child discovering, in his father’s drawer, the Santa Claus suit. And, later still, reading some Ladies Home Journal exposé (“Jacqueline Onassis’ secretary tells all …”) I felt almost sick. After the first few pages I put the magazine down. I wasn’t interested in the fragments, only in the fact that the glass had broken …
I can remember—just barely—a time when I didn’t know who the Beatles were. People my age are about the last generation who can say that—for the ones who were nine or ten instead of twelve when the Beatles burst into our consciousness, it must seem as if they have always been a part of life. We were in fifth grade when they first sang on the Ed Sullivan show to an audience that screamed so loud we scarcely heard them. I had no desire to scream or cry or throw jelly beans; an eighth grader would have been old enough to revert to childhood, but I was too young to act anything but old. Still, I remember that wonderful, shivery moment when I first experienced “I wanna hold your hand,” and it seemed as if a new color had been invented.
Because I can remember life without the Beatles and because it seems we aged together, I feel proprietary about them, when I see the new young crop of fans playing those first albums or, worse, abandoning them for weaker imitations. I feel a little weary too; how could I begin to explain what we’ve been through, John and Paul and Ringo and George and I: Liverpool accents and “A Hard Day’s Night” and Cynthia and Jane Asher and a reporter asking “What do you call your haircut?” and George saying “Arthur” and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ravi Shankar and Yellow Submarine and things not sounding as pretty as they used to, and Yoko—like a bad taste in the mouth—and Paul leaving and suing, and breaking up finally, which freed us to love them again, as the death of a senile grandparent frees the good memories.
The Beatles gave us something more than music. Quite a lot, I think. For one thing, they made kids part of history-journalistic history, at any rate. Through the Beatles’ existence we held some sort of control, we could act. Their appearance gave us our first sense of youth as a power—one that could hold moratoriums and keep LBJ from seeking re-election and raise a couple of million dollars for Bangladesh, without depending on grown-ups for anything. For that—for the fame they gave us—we gave fame back to them.
My love for the Beatles at ten or eleven was, I think, a pure,
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