Sir Paul and Me

Two days ago, on Remembrance Day, I dug a file out of my cabinet labelled “Poems Original”. I knew I had an old gem in there about that special day, but never wanted to look at it all these years because I figured it was probably very primitive. I wrote it in 1967 and it was published in our high school newsletter. It might have been the first thing I ever had published. I was 16.

I guess I thought that because I was so young back then, the poem would be simplistic and naïve. But this day I got up my nerve and read Forgotten Memories. It wasn’t as terrible as I imagined it all these years and so I published it on my blog. I changed a couple of words before I did. A little weird working on a poem you started when you were still too young to grow a beard.

My poetry writing began because the girl I was dreaming about all day long on the tractor on the farm was a poet and I was desperate to impress her. Now, 52 years later, you are reading my blog posts because I had the hots for a girl. As things developed, she wasn’t crazy about my poetry, believing it was too moon june spoon, whereas her offerings were deep, meaningful and, to my feeble mind, totally incomprehensible. I was as plain as a loaf of white bread; she was multigrain all the way.

Eventually, though it took a long time to leave that infatuation behind, she tossed me overboard. At least I think that’s how it happened. For one whole summer, at least, I rode around on the tractor singing sad Roy Orbison songs at the top of my lungs. Good old Roy invented the word “lonely” and he had me in mind when he did.

So I lost the girl but I gained a passion for writing. My poems are still all moon june spoon but I have kind of embraced that. I thought of getting a job with a greeting card company to pen verses for them but most of my poems then, and sometimes now, have tended to the sad side. Sad doesn’t mean deep. Just sad.

So there I sat on the couch Monday night with the actual printed page from the high school “Spirit” newsletter and read over my first published piece. It didn’t seem all that awful to me and then I cheered right up when I remembered that Paul McCartney wasn’t much older than me when he wrote the most recorded song in history, Yesterday. When he was 16, his mother died. Later, he wrote the iconic words and tune to Yesterday. Still later, he realized the song was not about a girl he’d broken up with as he guessed it was for a long time, but about his mother Mary.

Now, that’s deep.

It isn’t age that matters in the creative process, I think now. It’s inspiration. And that great Muse we always hear about, doesn’t discriminate when it decides to plunk some lyrics or verses into someone’s heart.

In 2011, I was driving home from singing at a nursing home and on the way I wrote a song as I drove that I am very proud of called Wishes. It was a 20-minute drive and the song was done by the time I got home. Like Sir Paul, non Sir Jim thought it was about a girl who had left him. Only later did I realize it was about my older brother Bill who had died four months before.

That old Muse has never heard about safe driving laws, I guess. He or she picks the time that seems most suitable and lets the arrows fly.

Roy Orbison wrote Only the Lonely sitting in his car outside his house. He went there to escape the crowd of people inside.

And he got an early start with his amazing gift. He wrote his first song when he was eight years old.

I bet it was a sad one.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.