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Lone
Wolf
Howl:
25 YEARS AND 2000 YEARS LATER...IMAGINE
(Originally
published
in
Cochrane Times: December 14, 2005)
The first time I met her I made sure to shake her hand. Not because I was particularly well mannered then, but because of what her son had told me about her childhood. They lived on Crocus Crescent, an easy walk from Manachaban School, which is exactly where I was during that lunch-hour reprieve from Grade 8. I shook her hand because it was a hand that had been raised in Liverpool, England, in the 1950s and chances are it had – on more than one occasion – rubbed palms with His hand. I wanted to touch the hand that may or may not have touched the hem of His leather jacket. December 8, 1980. I was working part-time at the Cochrane Foodmaster on main street, sandwiched between ice cream and dry goods, and my sister picked me up in her red and white Mustang coupe after work that Monday night, turned north on 4th Ave., and as I eyeballed the Red Rooster hoping for a slurpee the announcer interrupted the CKXL radio program to report a shooting had taken place in New York. By the time we got home, the shooting was upgraded to murder and a man (whom I did not, at the time, know anything about) was dead. And with His death, they said, came the death of an era. Everybody was talking about it because everyone had an opinion on this man. Some were very shaken up… stricken, I think, would be the word, and others were less compassionate. Comeuppance some said (some went so far as to call it justice) for daring to quip that He and His band had become more popular than you-know-who. More popular? That’s a tough one. I guess it depends on where you take your poll. If you stood in the middle of Strawberry Fields, Central Park, last Thursday, you’d get one answer. If you stood in the middle of Cochrane on any given Sunday, with your choice of close to 20 different churches but not a single outlet in town to buy a copy of Rubber Soul, you’d get a different answer. It’s nobody’s deliberate intention that it should be this way, of course, but it highlights the futility of popularity contests. Knowing, however, that popularity is no reliable measure of quality in this world, let us instead compare the two icons and consider what they have in common: Both were rebels for their generation, no doubt about that. Each spoke out against the times, and used the language of metaphor to do it (one sang pop songs and the other spun parables). As a result, the sort of cement-headed groupies who never quite listen or understand – but always enjoy the perks that come from hanging out with a superstar – constantly surrounded them. Each was raised without their biological fathers (one father did show up at his son’s mansion, après stardom, and was sent packing; we’re still waiting for the other’s father to make an appearance). Each asked their listeners to imagine there was no heaven, no hell, to live for today and to give peace a chance. Both knew their religions very well, but neither had much use for them. Instead they reminded us – in the most painfully simplistic of ways (remember who they were talking to) – that all we need is love. Finally, each seemed to know what was coming down the pike, both observing in their respective ballads, "The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me." And we did. So now, as we remember the event of 25 years ago, and as we prepare to celebrate the event of 2000 years ago, let’s put aside popularity contests for the nonce and imagine the two as equals, sitting together somewhere, perhaps in someone’s bathroom, drinking some wine, maybe smoking a little grass. Imagine they’re comparing the holes we made in them, talking about all that they may have done had we allowed them each another 40 years, and sadly shaking their heads at the wars and hostages, the greed and commercialism, the blatant unchecked idiocy that continues to unfold across the universe. Imagine the two of them sitting there, exhausted from laughter, wondering why they even bothered.
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