Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now by Mary Schmich

Author:Mary Schmich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agate Publishing
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

SUNDAY, DEC. 2, 2001

George Girls

Nobody was a George girl, at least no girl I knew. You were a Paul girl. Or a John girl. Or, if only because you liked his name and wanted to stand out in the screaming crowd, maybe you were among the two or three Ringo girls on the planet.

But George Harrison didn’t stir the teenybopper heart to manic highs and desperate lows back in the Beatles’ heyday. For the necessary teenybopper fix of unrequited yearning, a girl needed the more ebullient boys in the band.

Oh, that Paul. He was so darn cute and cuddly. When that mop top flopped, a girl’s goose bumps did the twist-’n’-shout.

And John. Moody, manly, engaging John. His whiff of danger was as seductive as patchouli oil.

And Ringo. What a lovable goof.

But George?

The news stories about George’s death Thursday called him “the quiet Beatle.” Maybe that appealed to a few dozen mature girls in some hidden corner of the globe, but to the teenyboppers and pre-boppers I knew, quiet just meant boring.

Certainly to me — a Paul girl, I’m sorry to say — George seemed wooden and remote. Where Paul was light and airy, George was dark and dense. While Paul’s bubbly persona teased the girls with a “Come on, come on,” George exuded a silent “Let me be.” Even his smiles often seemed forced.

It’s not surprising that in death, as well, George didn’t make a splash, except to the extent that the death of any Beatle lands like a cannonball in the pop culture pond. There was no high tragedy or distinction to mark his transport from this world. He would be outlived by Paul and Ringo. He’d be eternally upstaged by John, whose 1980 murder by a crazy fan keeps him forever fascinating.

George died, quite ordinarily, of cancer. He wasn’t sufficiently old to die, but not heartbreakingly young either. He was just a man in late middle age stolen by the same common criminal that takes millions of people whose names you’ve never heard.

And yet, even to many of us who were never George girls, his death matters some.

A band is a symbol of its generation. When the bands that defined your youth break up, you realize, maybe for the first time, that you’re getting old. When the band members start to die — not of anything as theatrical and premature as suicide or drugs but of the common afflictions that eventually hijack us all — you realize you weren’t old when they broke up; but you are ancient now.

Or, in the case of George, you realize that you’ve grown up.

When I heard that George had died, I realized that over the years, probably like many other former teenyboppers, I’d become a bit of a George girl without noticing. His songs, which in their infancy were the ones that caused me to stomp over to the record player and lift the needle to the next groove, grew over time to seem intriguing, complex, appealingly melancholy in ways that a 13-year-old rarely understands.

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