MUSIC | THE BEATLES
The Song That Got Me Into Music
Maybe I was already an old soul by age five
The year is 2001 and my parents and I are staying in our family’s commodious little cabin on a quiet street of a sedated lakeside town. The exterior is beige, the windows are a worn red with paint chipping from the sills, and the humble little structure stands in a sparse forest composed almost completely of spruces and pines.
Nuangola is a drab, lifeless, and inert Pennsylvania town whose cultural epicenter consists of little more than upper middle class men on posh boats wearing Polos and women in bathing suits and sundresses. The gray skies poking through the unvariegated trees above us seem to subside for only hours at a time during our dragging stays in this slow-moving nowhere.
“Can we go home yet?” I ask on our third day at the lake’s sandless beach for roughly the seventeenth time. The land is infertile grounds for sculpting sand castles and the gentle lapping of water renders moats useless, anyway. Whatever I can erect from the stones and pebbles lining the shore will be real estate unworthy of proper guard. Motorboats command a tide that’s as careless and unhurried as the town around it. In Hawaii this sort of leisure would feel welcome, but in this backwoods borough, it’s unmistakably macabre. More…
