Yellow is her favorite color

My ‘almost’ 3 year old granddaughter wouldn’t nap today.  That’s okay. Usually she conks out and sleeps for a couple of hours, but today she just rested, read a block-book a few hundred times and talked to her dolly and herself. I have her one day a week, and that day is as special and as sweet as a bowl of peach swirl in July or cocoa and whipped cream in January.

Because she was awake I brought her downstairs, “to rest” in the hopes that couch and snuggles might do the trick. I closed my eyes, she settled against me, and quietly her little voice began to sing, “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine...,” over and over like a whispering mantra. So sweet, it was everything I could do to hold back tears.

When Yellow Submarine was released by the Beatles in 1969 I had just returned home from living for a year in South Africa. As a young women (and Beatles fan) back in The States, after experiencing an unforgettable opportunity, it never occurred to me to think forward. At that age we’re so engrossed in the ‘now’ of life that imagining the road ahead beyond the next class, or job, or relationship is simply unthinkable.

So today I thought back to the 1960’s young woman who sang a hardy rendition of Yellow Submarine in the car whenever it came on the radio. Never did I ever imagine that my ‘almost’ three year old granddaughter would love and sing the very same song while snuggling against me, a woman in my 60s years later.

At my age generational things like that are eye opening. Whether it’s spurred by the actual music, or cartoons on TV, realizing the connection that hops a generation I find interesting. I didn’t play Beatles music when my kids were growing up but my daughters loved John, Paul, George and Ringo. My youngest was a real posters-hanging-on-college-room-walls fan. Maybe liking what I liked was a given. But, it was never as heart moving as this little-one whispering a song that years ago played over and over in my head when the idea of being married, having children and grandchildren was as far from thought as being an adult orphan.

I think being a writer of essays, a memoirist and op-ed writer, has something to do with this. We inner-brain writers, we self-examiners, we emotional-unloaders, have to dig deep and splay ourselves in order to be heard and read and understood. Because we search inside our psyches often, Yellow Submarine incidents take on self-historical importance.

I’ve often told my kids to sometimes think forward so that they may understand just how lucky they are to be young. But they don’t. And I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I never did and though it took half a century to realize how lucky I was back then, I get it now. Because while an ‘almost’ three year old leaned against my heart today, I realized that no matter the years which separate us…“We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine...