By April of 1964, they’d captured the top five spots on the American singles charts. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.Ī year before I saw that girl was when the Beatles first became wildly popular. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me.
In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning. And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.) I looked for her every time I used that hallway. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. (We were the so-called baby-boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared.Ī dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, “With the Beatles.” All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell-that beautiful, nameless girl clutching “With the Beatles” to her chest. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I have a clear memory that it was the original, British version of the album, not the American or the Japanese version. The LP “With the Beatles.” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow. She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious. She was hurrying down the long, dim hallway of the old school building, her skirt fluttering. The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again. This was in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. There’s one girl-a woman who used to be a girl, I mean-whom I remember well. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being. I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older.
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