A Hard Day's Night

Good music helps set our broken bones. It’s the medicine we take when lovers quit loving us or kids grow up and move on…the dog dies…a best pal passes…the blood test comes back wrong.

It’s super quiet around the house, so I put on some Bill Evans, then some Beatles.

“If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true…”

Appreciating the Beatles more than ever these days while reading a book that Peterman loaned me. “John & Paul” is about the creative fusion of Lennon and McCartney, how they’d work a new song, most of the time for weeks or months.

It also examines John’s professional jealousy, particularly Paul’s success with “Yesterday,” which changed the Beatles from a rock band to the greatest English act since Shakespeare.

Ah, those lads … cheeky, witty, wise beyond their years. Paul wrote “Yesterday” at 22; John wrote “In My Life” at 25.

As with many legendary songwriters, their hearts were better than their voices. But what words.

“Eleanor Rigby…waits by a window, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door…”

Weren’t we lucky to be alive when all that happened? Aren’t we glad that Paul and Ringo still behave like the cheeky lads we’ve loved for 60 years?

Too often, we celebrate the wrong stuff — tech moguls, money, movie stars. What we really need these days: songwriters.

As with many great artists, there is a wistfulness to the Beatles’ best work, painterly reflections on loneliness and disappointment. Plus, inevitably, a haunting beauty.

To me, music helps set our broken bones. It’s the medicine we take when lovers quit loving us or kids grow up and move on…the dog dies…a best pal passes…the blood test comes back wrong.

When life piles up, and simple words fail us, there is always music — a tiny sign that God is still sitting at the keyboard late at night, messing with the keys.

The reason our house is unusually quiet? Late yesterday, Smartacus and I raced to the west side for two medical emergencies:

1. Cakes had fallen with a stick in her mouth and was headed for the emergency room;

2. Rapunzel had an infected bug bite that was causing a scary fever and chills.

Life turns on a dime, doesn’t it?

There we were, me and my Ringo, finishing up our chicken bowls, on a rather routine night, when the calls and texts started pouring in. Cakes was headed to the ER; her aunt was too.

My immediate reaction: Was this all a bad dream?

Smartacus and I jumped in the car and raced over.

“I’m sure it’s all fine,” I said during the cross-town trip.

“Yeah, it’ll be fine,” said Smartacus.

“All fine,” I added just for insurance.

As hoped, all was fine indeed. Cakes didn’t need emergency care after all, she’d merely cut the roof of her mouth. The pediatrician, examining iPhone photos, assured her mother all was well, though a close call, for sure.

Rapunzel’s bug bite/infection was a bit tricker, but after four hours in the ER, she came home patched up and fine.

Smartacus stayed over to buy bagels the next day, and help with child care. I came home at 1 a.m. to tend the dog.

Now — next morning — it’s unusually quiet around here. No Smartacus, no TV, no sizzling bacon, just the echoes from a wild night that turned out to be OK, as Lennon sings:

“Imagine no possessions,

I wonder if you can,

No need for greed or hunger,

A brotherhood of man…”

That’ll never happen, John. Nice try. Then again, why not?

Meanwhile, the vagaries of life are both cruel and comic, just like the Beatles were to each other from time to time.

“[Cakes] was doing full B-movie, campy horror-film type sound effects, drooling and weird voices last night after it happened and i presumed it was all self manufactured but i couldn’t tell for sure,” Cakes’ mother explained the next day in a family text.

Soon after, another text that is really a discourse on the quirky nature of a mother’s life:

“[Cakes] woke up talking and moving fine … and then as we were leaving for school she showed me she could still do whatever weird gurgling-her-saliva sound effect thing she was doing after the accident and i said ‘oh good, so that’s just a trick you can do, not the accident?’ and she said ‘yep!’ with absolute enthusiasm and skipped away.”

As the Beatles knew, sometimes the universe wears dark trousers; sometimes it prefers a party hat.

Life’s a walrus.

And what doesn’t kill you makes you funnier.

Next week: The much-sought recipe for french fry potato salad.

I expect french fry potato salad will ride that same wave of what I call “a mystifying illogic”…the kind that leads to absurd success for stuff that makes no sense. Like K-Pop Demon Hunters, for instance. Or mushroom coffee.

—from next week’s column