Yesterday, Forever
One Saturday recently I was invited to an open-air festival and concert, a charity fundraiser for an equine rehabilitation center held by a church out in the country. It was a rare day for August in Wisconsin. Though sunny from one end of the sky to the other, the high was only seventy-five and humidity was nowhere to be found. Though I had plenty I should have been doing, I was glad to forego it in order to attend the event. I could not shake the feeling that something special awaited me.
After leaving the freeway I followed backroads, ultimately finding myself being directed to a grassy field, guarded by aged Scotch pines and undergrowth, serving as a parking lot. The walk up a gravel drive led past more fields where llamas grazed, followed by a few quaint outbuildings, and a long, low fellowship hall. As I continued to climb, a red pole barn housing the equine center presided over the view, and beneath it, under the ridge of the hill, an open lot allowed for a stage and a seating area. Homespun concessions were available just beyond, under trees generously beckoning, offering shade and a place to picnic.
My friends had already arrived and they had offerings of their own: a cool drink and a place in the sun with a view of the stage. We exchanged pleasantries and a few introductions while awaiting the main act, a Beatles tribute band. Retreating gradually from conversation, I absorbed the surroundings, observing people, adding them to the collection of character trading cards stuffed into drawers in my head. Amidst the crowd were the young and the younger still being herded by them. There were, however, many more sexagenarians and seasoned citizens of even greater seniority present. A collective expectancy resonated amongst them, floating on a breeze cool enough to provide counterpoint to the warm sunshine.
The Britins; Wisconsin based Beatles tribute band. Concert at Cedar Springs Church in Slinger, WI August 2020.
As the band took the stage, welcomed the audience, and began the first song—All My Lovin’—something at once strange and wonderful unfolded. Time was almost imperceptibly moving backwards with each chord, each word. Women my own age and even older walked forward to gather before the band as if responding to a tent revival altar call. As they did so, the years of motherhood, even grand-motherhood, fell away. They were sixteen and it was 1967. The music transformed them into carefree versions of themselves as they swayed with the grace and poetry of youth. They sang in unison to each song, smiling at one another knowingly. The tempo slowed to accommodate the poignant Yesterday, and sisters of the sixties drew sweethearts by the hand to join them, drifting on the melody, remembering loves lost and found again.
A slim woman in a bejeweled, white dress leapt and twirled and wove her way between the familiar notes and refrains, as if she were not only in another time but in another place altogether. Long, dark tresses, traced in gray, floated in the breeze. She tossed them like a wild horse does its mane, racing the wind along a stretch of beach. She was remembering again what she has never really forgotten, so a part of her are the songs of her youth.
As the band wove the magic of its mystery tour, it was no surprise to the couples in each other’s arms, to the raven beauty or those who watched her, the revelation that moments do not really die. They go to a place where they can be found again in the music.
Songs indeed have a way of preserving memory, like treasures in amber. And not just the Beatles’ body of works, though they did write the soundtrack of a generation. My own taste tends toward a different genre, Mancini and Mercer, the stuff of my parents’ romance. My younger brother calls it “mommy and daddy music.” A favorite of mine celebrates the capacity of melody and lyric to allow a kind of time travel: Stardust, by Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish, known as the song about a song about love.
“A stardust melody, the memory of love’s refrain.”
Just typing these words, my eyes mist over as my mind fills with visions of childhood peeking round the corner to watch as Len slowly waltzed around the kitchen, holding Margie close, while Nat King Cole unforgettably serenaded them on the radio.
I hoard images and sounds, and the people who are remembered in them, in journals and notebooks, and even the directories in my brain, hoping not to lose them. Even if I forget where I put them for the moment, I know if I wait, they will surface in some inspiration of scene or character. Who knows, but that a future tale of mine may be graced again by the lovely grandmother, and the eternal girl of the ebony locks who lives on inside her, dancing and singing along with Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Thinking of them, I find I, too, believe in yesterday.
