flashback

Scary, huh. It's hard to believe this is real but I've often to found the truth to be must stranger than fiction and rarely in need of embellishment. One of the first pronouncements I remember coming out of my father's mouth was in regard to the events depicted below. We were sitting at the dinner table. It must have been summer since there was light streaming in the window while we were forced to eat our vegetables.

I was on one end of the table and my Dad on the other. I don't remember the previous conversation that led to this but he proclaimed there would be no more Beatles cartoons in his house. "Why?" I asked. He answered: " They claimed they were better than Jesus Christ!" (I may have been in the first or second grade... ) "Ooooh," I answered.

This stuck with me for a long time. I was the eldest and one of those children who worked very hard to please my parents.... until the age of 12 or 13. The tides turned quickly, much to my father's dismay. When one realizes that the response for everything they ask for will be NO, well, one just quits asking. My solution? I determined that if I made good grades I could do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't ask. I played a lot of Beatles, did my homework to "The Tomorrow Show" with Tom Snyder... and pretty much anything else.

C'est la vie.