Photo by Friso Baaij on Unsplash
At four months old, a baby should be beginning to reach out and grasp objects. He will start to make more discrete phonemes – “wahs” and “oohs” but also guttural “khas” from time to time. He starts to laugh, and for adults, eliciting that laugh through tickles or an unexpected face becomes an addiction. He will start trying to roll over. Tummy time is essential, but he hates it. Multiple nightly feedings still occur. He wakes up sometimes as early as 4:30 in the morning, ready to go.
I was 30, having just finished a master’s program in English literature the month before, and was now on monthlong nephew duty. David was a bit of a mystery to me: in high school and college, peak babysitting age, I pointedly avoided small children. The youngest of two siblings, I missed out on babysitting at home too. But my sister, David’s mother, was back to work, I was coming down from writing a 50-page thesis on medieval Christian literature about Muslims, and two months away from getting married. David, with his wispy reddish hair and long, long eyelashes, was the perfect distraction.
I arrived in Pittsburgh from my home in Montana over Memorial Day weekend, just as the summer heat and humidity began to set in. It was here, in my sister and brother-in-law’s home, that David and I spent day after routine day – with him napping, eating, playing, and me juggling his care with household chores.
That June was also the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ momentous album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s difficult for students of rock ’n roll and the Beatles to describe just how important that album was – it marked both the end of the Beatles’ manic touring years and the sometimes slapdash albums that went with them (much of their first album, Please Please Me, was recorded in one day; recording sessions for other early albums were squeezed in between tour dates) and the beginning of their intense bouts of studio experimentation. Sgt. Pepper stands as a hallmark of the kind of weird artistry that could go into a rock album, with its mixture of straight-up rockers like the title track, psychedelic ruminations such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Within You Without You,” and throwbacks and style-mixings such as “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “She’s Leaving Home.” The album, in other words, shook up popular music in ways that it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t there to remember it to understand.
Amid that anniversary, and the re-release of a new remastered album, I played with David. Still a little too young to sit upright, even with support, he spent a lot of time on his play pad, a small square quilt with two mobiles over the top. Lying on his back, he would reach out and grab the fox or the owl, sometimes managing to make it squeak or play a tune, and I would entertain him with rattles or teethers or colorful contraptions with mirrors or giant beads.
I found out early that David liked to move. He would lie on his back and kick his legs and punch his fists, a drooly smile on his lips, especially when he could hear any percussive sound. I jokingly called it “purposeful flailing” because he always seemed so resolute when he did it. My sister, a musician, had been working with him on simple percussive rhythms since his birth, and he seemed to respond well to any music with a steady beat. Rock ’n roll, with a back beat built into four-four time, seemed to me the perfect music to get under his skin and get him moving.
Early Beatles songs seemed perfect for the task.
I’ve been a Beatles fan since I was 14 when the compilation album 1 was released. I received a copy for Christmas in 2000 and within weeks, I had the whole thing nearly memorized. I had been exposed to the Beatles before that, mostly at a friend’s house where her parents often played their music, but listening to 1 was an extended orientation with a band I continue to love. The album, which includes 27 number one hits, runs chronologically, from 1962’s “Love Me Do” to 1970’s “The Long and Winding Road.” It’s a way to hear the band change and evolve in truly radical ways. To think that the same group that performed “I Want to Hold Your Hand” later released “Come Together” just a few years later speaks to their range but also the changes happening in popular music at the time.
But being a Beatles fan in a small Montana town in the year 2000 was lonely, and it’s still lonely. Most people my age know about the Beatles, because you can’t not know about them, but few share my enthusiasm. Even people my age who have adopted classic rock as their music, as I have, usually stick to the likes of Led Zeppelin or Queen or AC/DC, all bands I love. But the Beatles are somewhere else for me, on their own plane. I think because they were the first band I truly loved at a time in my life when I, like many, felt so awkward and isolated makes them all the more beloved.
David was a captive audience. I started playing Beatles songs for him, and I sang and kept the beat with hand claps and leg pats, and he kicked his legs and punched his fists.
“Yellow Submarine,” “Eight Days a Week,” “A Hard Day’s Night.” He loved them all.
When he became tired but fought sleep and fussed and cried, I would pick him up so his head rested on my right shoulder, and we would listen to the Beatles then too. “All You Need is Love,” “Hey Jude,” “Let it Be,” and we would walk across the hardwood floors of the house around and around in a circle until the rhythm soothed him to sleep. I would glance over my shoulder into the mirror in the entryway to check if he was sleeping, pleased to see his eyes closed and mouth slightly open and a spot of drool on my shirt. I would put him in his swing and let him sleep.
Those days could be incredibly boring, with the same routine over and over. Up at 5:30 and off for a run, then back home to take over when his parents left for work by 7:30. Breakfast and play time and naps and bottles and play time and more naps. Maybe a walk. The world that was, to him, so new and bright and fascinating, became to me mundane. Except it wasn’t.
As an undergraduate, I hoped to be a fiction writer. As I worked on my senior honors thesis, a short story cycle set in Depression-era Montana, I received from one of my readers probably the highest compliment about my writing.
“It’s mired in the everyday,” she said.
That was what I wanted. I loathed melodrama. I wanted my writing to be about normal, boring people doing normal, boring things. So I wrote stories about people making relationship decisions that seem inconsequential but actually meant everything; about an unhappy couple having a daylong fight; about a little boy who wants to take a ride in his aunt’s fancy car. They often took place in the dusty heat or frigid cold of rural Montana, a place that, to outsiders, may seem stultifying boring. To me, it is anything but. Because aren’t we all boring people doing boring things that add up to the completion of our lives? That was what I wanted to capture, then and now.
In the months after my time taking care of David, as my husband and I moved into our new home and settled into our lives taking place across the country in Washington, I started to think back on that month full of routine, boring days, and I missed them. They were special days, and they were important. I missed my gurgly nephew who seemed to learn something new or do something new every day. From 2,500 miles away, I had to rely on photos and videos, each one showing a slightly different David as he learned and grew. They were wonderful to receive, but they also reminded me of my distance from him.
It was in those months that followed my time with David that I was relistening to “A Day in the Life,” the final song of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and realized just how important our time was together. The song had, up until then, almost always made me feel so melancholy that I could rarely listen to it, but on that fall day, I realized for the first time how that song, which I had overlooked for so long, was saying everything I had tried to say for years.
“A Day in the Life” juxtaposes the dull with the dramatic, the boring with the overwhelming, to communicate the simultaneous insignificance and importance of everyday life.
“I read the news today, oh boy,” John Lennon sings in the song’s first lines, a reference to a news story Lennon had read about the death of a man in a car crash, according to an interview with Lennon reproduced in The Beatles Anthology.
“He blew his mind out in a car. / He hadn’t noticed that the lights had changed. / A crowd of people stood and stared,” Lennon continues, his brassy tenor voice revealing little pathos.
When I worked as a journalist before going to graduate school, I had seen that crash and those crowds before. My job then was to record the everydayness of life, in the sometimes miniscule progression of a story from article to article. Perhaps that banality of journalism is part of what drew me to the profession after college, when my desire to write fiction gave way to my need to pay bills. I recorded the lives of ordinary people in features stories about their musical talents or community service or professional achievements. I was also there at drownings and suicides, when an ordinary day turns into a nightmare for someone. The crowd of people standing and staring – sometimes asking me (identifiable as a reporter by the pen and notebook I hold in my hands) what had happened – forms organically and almost instantly, made up of people going about their ordinary days and coming upon someone else’s tragedy. But for the passersby rubbernecking, straining to see past the police tape and first responders, this worst of events for one person is just a point of gossip over dinner for another. It’s a “did you see that in the paper this morning?” for thousands of others.
In “A Day in the Life,” Lennon returns to the news story in the song’s final stanza, when he references a story that ran on the same page as that of the crash, according to Howard Goodall in the documentary Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution. This story was about potholes: “I read the news today, oh boy,” he sings, repeating the opening lines. “Four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire. / And the though the holes were rather small, / they had to count them all.” The echoing of the “news” line is Lennon’s signal to the listener that he is returning thematically to the irony of the newspaper – that hopelessly ordinary item reporting on the death of someone that caught the attention of passersby and which, while probably not affecting their lives directly, brought crashing down the lives of others. The people on the sidewalk, as they eyed the gruesome car wreck, had the luxury of returning to the ordinary. The family and friends of the victim did not. The victim did not.
But this time, Lennon is speaking about something so ordinary to be laughable. There are so many potholes, causing so many problems, that someone spent time counting every single one of them. How boring is one’s life when it is spent counting potholes? Yet this story, almost ridiculously routine, runs on the same page as the story about a man losing his life. The mundane is juxtaposed with the tragic on the newspaper pages and in song, just as it is in real life.
Lennon’s verses are interrupted by Paul McCartney’s: “Woke up, fell out of bed, / dragged the comb across my head / … / Found my coat and grabbed my hat, / made the bus in seconds flat.” The lines recall McCartney’s memories of catching the bus as a schoolboy, but they could easily apply to just about any middle-class working stiff, repeating the same ceremony every morning. McCartney’s section is ended with the line, “Somebody spoke and a I went into a dream,” where Lennon returns to vocals, singing a coloratura that is underlined by a growing orchestra that foreshadows the direction of the song.
“A Day in the Life” begins simply with a strumming guitar, piano chords, and Lennon’s vocals. The musical simplicity seems to mirror the ordinariness of the song’s subject. Perceptively, Goodall points out that Ringo Starr’s syncopated drums throughout the song hint at a hidden, growing complexity. And by the song’s end, we find ourselves in the midst of a dense orchestral forest. According to Goodall, McCartney was influenced at this time by aleatoric composition, which requires the composer to allow elements of chance into the music composition process. It is this strategy that the Beatles employed for the final climax of “A Day in the Life.” The song would end by chance, just as life so often happens.
According to McCartney’s account for The Beatles Anthology, instrumentalists were told to start at the lowest note their instrument played, then over the course of fifteen bars, move upward on the scale. “The result was a crazy big storm,” McCartney said. That E-major chord is matched with chords on seven pianos, a harmonium, and an electric organ, all bringing the song to a thundering, artificially prolonged final note. That quickly, “A Day in the Life” moves definitively from ordinary to overwhelming, but the song has been growing to this point all along.
As I listened to “A Day in the Life” again and again, I sensed new seeds of that final chord – it is always coming, from the first piano chord to the final number counted off under Lennon’s coloratura. The scale, growing in pitch and volume, gives us the feeling that we are in the middle of something we cannot control and cannot fully comprehend. Then we reach the final chord, shaken, listening, perhaps confusedly, as the chord dies down, at an artificially slow pace. This is, perhaps, where my sadness sometimes comes from. Something has happened by the end of the song that is shattering yet ineffable.
That is the importance of daily life. It is a note, a drum beat.
Listeners of McCartney’s music probably noticed long ago the songwriter’s fondness for writing songs about other people. There are Eleanor Rigby, Desmond and Molly Jones, Uncle Albert and Admiral Halsey. Lennon noted the stories too. “He makes them up like a novelist,” he said in an interview reproduced in The Beatles Anthology. “You hear lots of McCartney-influenced songs on the radio – these stories about boring people doing boring things.” Lennon’s dismissal of McCartney is interesting, considering the former’s contributions to a song that so accurately portrays boring people living boring lives. Ironically, Lennon did it too, in songs about himself, when he sang “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Nowhere Man.” But he also contemplated the banal. Lyrics for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” were taken from a decades’ old broadside. “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam” are both about ordinary, slightly unsavory people. All this shows that the psychedelic, weird, and experimental band that took joy in the bizarre also explored the common, even trite aspects of life.
For a month in Pittsburgh, I was a boring person taking care of a boring four-month-old in a boring house on a boring street. We sang songs and played with rattles in the most boring way possible, and I changed his diaper, burped him, and put him down for naps, boringly. I cheered him on as he rolled over for the first time. I kept track of the new sounds he made. It was glorious, just as boring things in life often are. They were days in my life whose significance I have difficulty describing. Words are insufficient; music perhaps is better.
Almost three years after spending my month with David, as I revisit “A Day in the Life,” I realize now how important those individual days are. Those days are made up of boredom and tedium, but they are also made up of the things that are life. All that tedium and boredom builds up to the more momentous days: the weddings, the funerals, the birthdates. And even the boring days, filled with their small pleasures – going for a run, laughing with a friend, cooking dinner – are important. They matter.
My husband and I have moved from Washington to Pittsburgh so I can attend a PhD program. Now 700, 800, 900 days later, David the infant is now a toddler and constantly busy, greeting his days with enthusiasm, after he has finished his milk and watched Mickey Mouse. He approaches the world with endless fascination.
As I pushed him in his stroller on a walk recently, I asked him what he saw.
He pauses, looking. “I see a bird.”
“What color is that bird?”
“Yellow.”
“What else do you see?”
“I see a bird.”
Every bird is a new bird. Every bird is exciting.
“David, do you see these flowers?” I turned the stroller so he can see a bunch of deep purple columbines growing in a yard. “What color are they?”
“Purple.”
“Yes! That’s Mommy’s favorite color,” I say.
My family and I get to watch David as he walks and runs, gabs endlessly, and dances while he shaking maracas and hitting rhythm sticks. He likes to play the piano while singing “Ee-i-ee-i-oh.” I taught him the chorus to “She Loves You:” he sings it in his two-year-old drawl. He has grown, incrementally and sometimes invisibly, but the result is a toddler who no longer remembers those days we spent together when he learned how to hold onto objects and roll over from back to front. I will remember them for both of us. I’ll remember the way we walked circles around the house, how my upper back ached from leaning awkwardly as I carried him, how my shirt sometimes grew slimy from his drool. And I’ll remember that splendid weight of him on my shoulder, and I’ll rejoice that this memory too is mired in the everyday.
As I continue my intermittent babysitting duties, I teach him more. I play “Hey Jude” as we do other activities: building a block house for his favorite stuffed animal or playing with his train set. Eventually, it sticks. He’s begun to randomly sing “Na na na na” to himself: while playing in the living room, while riding in the car. He also likes the animation in the “Yellow Submarine” video, but he declines to sing the chorus. He lets me do it instead.
One afternoon, he buries me with stuffed animals while I lie on the couch. Sitting on me, he demands I sing “Hey Jude.”
“More, more ‘Hey Jude,’” he says as I peer from under a stuffed elephant that I bought for him before he was born and I referred to him as “Peanut.”
“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. / Take a sad song and make it better,” I sing. When I finish the verse he repeats,
“More ‘Hey Jude.’” He claps his hands together, approximating the sign in American Sign Language for “more,” a holdover from his days in speech therapy.
“Hey Jude, don’t be afraid…” I continue, all the way through the remaining verses.
We sing the coda together. He cannot carry a tune yet, but he seems to enjoy knowing all the words.
Briana Wipf is currently a PhD student studying medieval literature and the digital humanities. Before returning to school, she covered her home state of Montana as a journalist. Her creative writing has appeared in The Blood Pudding, Montana Mouthful, Change Seven, and others. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with her husband, Jesse, and their dog, Roger Daltrey.