I cannot remember if she was German or Dutch. Perhaps both. She was a guest of ours one Christmas, my sister's classmate from the missionary school in Murree. Among the things she brought with her was a cassette, a purple Agfa 60 minutes one.
That is the first time I remember hearing The Beatles. I have no memory of them during the sixties. We arrived in America three months after they first did as a group, and lived in the midwest for six years. There was no mark of them in my consciousness during that time.
But in the early to mid-seventies, I heard Love Me Do. I Saw Her Standing There, The Long And Winding Road and other songs recorded on that tape.
One of my cousins had the album Let It Be. Was it because there was no album in the cover, or because it was badly scratched that we never listened to it? I loved the cover though and wished I could have it.
***
Upon returning to America in 1979, among my first Christmas gifts here were three Beatle albums. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road and Yellow Submarine. Most of the beautiful, silly, quirky songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but the ones on those albums that really appealed to me were George Harrison's. I could not put a finger on why, except to say that like Lennon, and yet apart from him, he was reaching outward, beyond his world, and one could see that in songs like Within You Without You, or even It's All Too Much.
It is painful to watch him in the film Let It Be, as he struggles with his school chum McCartney. In one part of the Anthology, George makes the quip about how Paul was older than him by eight months, and how Paul always made it known to George that he was older than him by eight months.
Through his struggles, his addictions, his search for the spiritual, Harrison made some lovely music. Today marks ten years since his passing, and since I was introduced to him around Christmas, and got parts of him another Christmas, it seems fitting that the window today be dedicated to my favorite Beatle, George Harrison. May his memory be eternal.
