Let It Be, Part One of Two

One spectacularly clear June morning, my friend Patrick and I met at an old fire road in Franklin Canyon where dogs can run free. The terrain was flat and easy to walk, so with my little girl, Lily, riding high on my shoulders, we took our time enjoying the bird songs, the flowering yellow mustard plants, and the pungent smells of sagebrush and buckwheat.

After we’d walked a while, our dogs ran ahead to greet a man and a woman walking towards us. They bent down to pet our pups, but Patrick and I, chatting nonstop, barely noticed. As we approached the couple, the man stood, and I found myself eye level with his tan, hairless chest.

“Having a bit of a walk, eh?” he asked in a British accent; his voice sounded familiar.

“Yes we are,” I said looking up into big, puppy dog eyes.

I recognized those eyes. I knew that face. I squinted, trying to place him.

“Odd how warm it is this early,” he said, wiping the sweat off his chest with a black T-shirt.

“Yes, it is,” I answered, and then it hit me. He looked a little older than I remembered, with noticeable creases and well-worn lines on his well-known face—but no. It couldn’t be. It would be absurd to think … I mean, why would Paul McCartney be walking half naked on my dog path? This couldn’t possibly be him. Could it?

Well, if it was, he looked good. His hair was dark, almost shoulder length, the way he wore it during his Wings phase, but his face was clean-shaven. The woman with him was pretty, with long blond hair and a reserved smile. She reminded me of a young Linda McCartney.

“And who is this lovely lady sitting up there on your shoulders?’’ he asked, looking up at my daughter.

“This is Lily,” I said, smiling, but at the same time thinking about the headlines of Paul McCartney thirty-five years ago in newspapers like The Star: Is Paul Really Dead?—a  publicity stunt for the release of Magical Mystery Tour—my very first Beatles album, the one I’d wanted for my birthday because I liked the cover with the Beatles all dressed up like animal puppets. The album looked like it would sound fun, but when I finally listened, it sounded strange to my eight-year old ears. I didn’t understand the lyrics to “I Am The Walrus,” but then again, who did? “Strawberry Fields” fascinated me because my babysitter at the time told me that if I listened closely to the instrumental part at the end of the song, I could hear John saying, “I buried Paul.” I thought that was really neat; like I was in on a secret.

If this stranger on my walking path was Paul McCartney, I knew now he wasn’t dead, just older.

“You don’t have a shirt on!” Lily said, pointing at Paul’s chest.

“Well, I’m very hot, so I took it off,” he said easily, looking into my daughter’s eyes.

This unexpected encounter amazed me. Not one week before, I’d purchased the Beatles 1 CD; I thought Lily might like it. I grew up loving the Beatles. When I was a little girl, I would stand next to my mom in the front seat of our family’s old Chevy, and both of us would sing, “I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-a-a-and … I wanna hold your hand!” I also watched the Beatles on TV, first on the Ed Sullivan Show, and later in their own cartoon series every Saturday morning.

Standing there, eye to chest, knowing that this moment would never come again, I knew I had to ask. I wanted him to know that I—and now Lily­—that we sing …

“Paul McCartney, right?”

“Ye-e-e-es,” he dragged out his response as if to ask, “Who else would I be?”

“Right,” I said definitively.

Oh my God!