The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Maggie Trinkle
Last week I watched "Man on the Run" on the big screen and gobbled up the fab fan service with a theater full of Tucson Beatle people. It was a trove of McCartney wit and wisdom in an honest love letter to the past. I get it. It can’t go on forever.
I was born 10 years too late for their U.S. debut, and six weeks too early for my mother. As a lifelong Beatles fan who learned to read from the back of Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles were foundational to my earliest understanding about how life worked. Their lyrics and stories taught me about love, leaving home, taxes, and The End as I looked for Paul is Dead clues, and sang Maxwell’s Silver Hammer made sure she was dead.
But, it wasn’t until my dad held the newspaper up at the kitchen table and told me John Lennon had been shot that I understood what death really meant. John was gone.
Gone.
It was the saddest thing I’d ever heard.
I had just turned 6.
Growing up in Tucson, it was common knowledge that Linda had studied at the U of A. George watched his ex-wife marry Eric Clapton here. Ringo and Barbara dried up here. Paul and Linda had a ranch here. So far from the tan you get from the English Rain, Tucson even made it into their lyrics. Not only had The Beatles influenced my way of looking at the world, they had ties to my little town. It made the world feel not so big.
My Dad’s best friend, Keith, ran into Paul once at the drug store by his house. Story goes Keith pushed his own kids out of the way to say hello. Keith’s gone now, too. As is my Dad, who died of a brain tumor. Linda passed away in Tucson on April 17, 1998. George Harrison passed in 2001.
Life goes on. I’ve never run into a Beatle around town, but I still love a good second-hand story. What seemed impossible to my six-year-old brain, and most of the world at the time of John’s death is that The Beatles continued to make music together even though their producer and half of them are gone.
“Now and Then” was released right before my birthday a few years back, so I was listening to it that weekend, in a bit of an obsessive meditation over the meaning of life, now that I’m not six and I am squarely middle-aged.
Serendipitously, a Deconstructing the Beatles show was coming up close to where my friends lived, and so left my home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass and asked Scott Freiman for his expert opinion about my layman’s take that “Now and Then” was the best Beatle song ever. (While Freiman graciously deflected my emotional take, he did give me that it was a “great bookend” to “In My Life.”)
In my real life, I was coordinating my Mom’s move to assisted living from the road. A woman who once scraped up enough loose change so I could go see “A Hard Day’s Night” at the dollar theater when I was eight, couldn’t understand my love for the Beatles anymore.
“A Day in the Life” ends with all the musicians striking the final chord as hard they could, until all you can hear is the air in the background of Abbey Road, reminding us that eventually all we will hear is Beatles silence.
My mom was gone 10 months later.
Paul’s really is gonna be dead next time.
Ringo’s totally gonna peace out one day.
So I am. So will you. So will we all.
I still think being gone is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
For now, I’m just a Fan on The Run.
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