In My Life

This week I've been thinking about my earliest awareness of the Beatles. In rough chronological order, here's some of what I can remember:

• My aunt's copy of Meet The Beatles and a few of the orange and yellow label 45s (I think “Yellow Submarine” was one) seemed always to be lying around upstairs at my grandmother's house where I lived. I remember stacking up The Beatles and Johnny Cash and Mister Rogers on the spindle of our fold-up record player, latching the arm over them and letting them drop and play, one by one.

• In the apartment my mom and I had for a while, I remember playing by myself in the back hallway near the stairs and hearing "Hey Jude" on American Top 40 on the radio. This was too late for it to actually be in the charts, so it must have been a long-distance dedication or some other type of featured tune.

• My neighbor across the street, a boy named Johnny, was one of my earliest friends. He had sequential obsessions that he would talk about constantly: airplanes, insects, coins, the revolutionary war, Wacky Packages and, eventually, the Beatles. He seemed to know the names of all of their songs and albums, but I'm sure he didn't own any. He would recount for me the plots of Beatles cartoon episodes (I only remember seeing a few of these myself) and think up original ones, too. I have a very vivid image in my mind of the two of us playing with a set of little lock-together plastic clowns while "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (which I was sure was a Beatles song) played on the radio.

• Laurie, my friend in fifth and sixth grade, wore Beatles t-shirts to school almost every day and had ALL of their albums. I remember reading a newspaper article about John to her over the phone. It might have been about Sean's birth. I couldn't pronounce "Yoko Ono" at the time -- it was the first time I'd seen the name. About this time I started to notice Beatles movies showing up on cable TV.

• Another friend had the blue and red albums, which I taped with my stepfather's reel-to-reel and played constantly. Soon after, I made my first Beatles purchase: the White Album. I eventually hung the four included portraits in my high school locker. Somewhere in there I also bought Magical Mystery Tour, but I think I may have traded it in for a Doors LP.

• I remember doing research on the Beatles in my junior high school library, finding magazine and newspaper articles about them, but no books that I recall. I bought "In Their Own Words" and "The Beatles Trivia Quiz Book" and had them nearly memorized.

• I sometimes listened to Abbey Road in the high school music room with my tenth-grade boyfriend at lunch.

• I think I got both the Rarities and Double Fantasy albums the year John died. The week after his death, someone stole his picture from my locker.

• My college roommate Alison was a great Beatles fan. She played me all their fan club and Christmas messages and taught me how to play "All Together Now" on her guitar.

• Ten years later, I met my best friend John, one of the foremost Beatles experts anywhere. When we met, he made mix tapes for me including demos and alternate versions of my favorite songs, as well as tapes of his TBH radio show. He went on to write a successful series of books about the Beatles' recorded history and continues to write and publish books about the Beatles. Hell yes, I'm proud of him.

Even after piecing these memories together, I can't really figure out when or how I learned all the words to all of their songs on all of their albums. To me, Beatles music has been something that just exists, like oxygen.