Tunesday : Don't Pass Me By

Don't Pass Me By

(Starkey, Richard) Performed by The Beatles

I listen for your footsteps coming up the drive

Listen for your footsteps but they don't arrive

Waiting for your knock, dear, on my old front door

I don't hear it, does it mean you don't love me anymore?

I hear the clock a ticking on the mantel shelf

See the hands a moving but I'm by myself

I wonder where you are tonight and why I'm by myself

I don't see you, does it mean you don't love me anymore?

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

I'm sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair

You were in a car crash and you lost your hair

You said that you would be late about an hour or two

I said that's all right, I'm waiting here, just waiting to hear from you

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You'll never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

One two three four five six seven eight

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

This wasn't the song I was going to write about this week, but while reading the book of short stories How You Were Born, I was reminded of a story from my own youth for which this song seemed somewhat appropriate. Here's the context:

In the book there's a story called Acrobat, about an 11-year-old girl named Zoe, shy and new to town, who is intrigued by a flyer inviting children to an acrobatic demonstration in the park. When Zoe arrives, she is hyper-aware of her shabby clothing, and thinking of her mother's romance books, she muses --

Girls in these books were described as hovering or trembling on the brink of something. Zoe was skeptical. She felt she was slopping over, that an unending humiliation was beginning. Nothing could be more humiliating than a body.

And then she sees the acrobat for the first time --

She saw him standing by the steps of the bandshell and she saw the dragon inked blackish green along his shoulders, half-hidden by his dirty undershirt, which she knew was called a wife-beater, an exciting name, offering a glimpse into an adult world of beer bottles, broken windows, shouting.

When the dragon man lifts Zoe into the air with his feet (in what I called an airplane ride with my kids), she experiences a feeling of "dizzying liberation" where one is "just yourself, changed". There's so much want and need in the following scenes, the most innocent and confusing  of sexual awakenings, and you can't help but feel for Zoe as she wills the acrobat to acknowledge that she was a special participant; as she tries to doll herself up with a limp and bunchy dress, with splashes of water and barrettes for her bushy hair; as her mother begins to intuit why Zoe feels the need to dress up for the evening acrobatic performance --

Linda ran ahead, Zoe following carefully in her tight shoes, her mother beside her, mouth twitching in what Zoe felt was mockery. It made her walk more slowly, conscious of her own sweaty smell staining under her arms. For her mother it may have been something else. Fear, the wish to give a warning. Whatever it was, her mouth twitched.

After a scene that shows Zoe how her mother is seen by others, she spots the dragon man off to one side of the bandshell, and before the show begins, Zoe is compelled to make her way over to him --

She made herself move, walking toward him faster than she could think and with no idea what she wanted to say. Some words that would let him know that this was something she would remember and be grateful for, that would make him glad she was there. He would see that to her this was more than the disappointing trickle of people, the parched parkland and open sky, and that she, too, was more than those things. She would make him happy. 

When she reached him, he shook his head. 

"We begin in a minute, you should sit down."

He didn't recognize her. She waited, not able to believe it, but when he waved her away with even less patience she walked off, crouching down on the other side of the bushes, watching the men through the branches.

In a surprise ending, Zoe watches as the dragon man gives an affectionate kiss to a younger male acrobat and --

Surprise jolted her, that unplanned weightlessness overtaking her and making her body and the air around her strange. A depth and a lightness. Flying.

Okay, that's a lot of quoting from one story,  but author Kate Cayley captured so much of how I felt around that age -- the embarrassment of a changing body, the dawning realisation that others might be judging my mother unkindly -- a mother who regarded me with that same twitching, smirking mouth -- the same uncertainty when meeting older men: are you actually flirting with me or just being friendly?

To get down to specifics -- when Cora and I were twelve, we had matching t-shirts made at the local flea market. They were plain black shirts with a barely scooped neckline (nowhere near plunging, just obviously a girl's shirt) and we had decals of a Beatles lunchbox put on the fronts, and on the backs, Cora's said "Paul" and mine said "Ringo". The 70s were a big time for customised t-shirts and you could order decals from comic books (Keep on Truckin'!) and I remember that my little brother talked our Mum into buying him a shirt with his school nickname -- Bonewrapper -- printed in huge bone-letters across the front. I have no idea where that name came from, but I didn't think it was a compliment, and all the way home our big brother was squirming with discomfort until he finally blurted out something like, "I don't think Kyler should wear that shirt. It might be kind of...um...sexual." Of course, Mum was livid that she wasted the money on that shirt, wished that Ken had stopped her from buying it in the first place, and naturally, Kyler never wore it. Ken still calls our little brother Bonewrapper sometimes.

Unlike Kyler, I remember buying my own shirt for myself (I did have a job that summer) and I remember the particular freedom of finally making some of my own clothing choices that having money enabled. All through elementary school, we got new clothes once a year -- Back to School shopping in August -- and it was always a priority for my mother to devote part of her limited budget to getting me a little girl dress to wear on the first day of school and then again on picture day; that was her idea of respectability. I remember on grade 7 picture day I rebelled and wore some of my mother's clothes -- a beige peasant blouse, a pretty long floral skirt that she had made, and strappy high heeled sandals that had me limping by the end of the day (this was the only benefit of Mum staying in bed as we left for school in the mornings; she had no idea what I was wearing until I came lurching into the house that afternoon on blistery feet). 

I also remember that at the beginning of the summer I was twelve, my Dad came home with a garbage bag full of hand-me-downs from who-knows-where, and they were intriguing to me because the clothes had obviously belonged to a grown-up lady; and I was yearning to grow up. There were some crazy 70s-print dresses that I wished I had a reason to wear, and there were some cute shorts and tops sets, and very intriguing to me, was a blue tube top. The first day that it was hot enough for me to go bare shouldered, I wore that tube top out of the house, and that was the first time I saw my Mum doing that twitchy, near-smirky thing with her mouth. I barely had bumps under the elasticised top (that only served to flatten me out more) but it felt dirty to walk down the sidewalk like that, and in the end, I regretted it. Nothing could be more humiliating than a body. I never wore that tube top again, but in a strange aside, my mother did -- and this is what I mean about people judging her unkindly: she also never got new clothes and I can't fault her for wanting to be stylish herself, and if I was 12, she was 33 -- surely not an inappropriate age for a tube top in the 70s? The only problem was that my Mum was very busty and the elastic squished her breasts into tubes against her chest (can you picture that?) and that wasn't a very flattering look; I can only imagine what the neighbours thought. (I wrote here about how crazy my family eventually became and the nasty sendoff a neighbour gave to my Mum as she drove away from the house for the last time.)

So after all of that context, here's a short story --

That summer that I was twelve, I was walking up our street, wearing my Beatles lunchbox t-shirt and a pair of shorts. I was going to get the mail -- which even in the 70s was in a superbox a couple of blocks away, so think on that all you Canadians who are currently fighting against the end of door-to-door delivery -- and at the end of our block, I passed by a van with a couple of older men in contractor overalls standing beside it; likely plumbers or electricians who were doing work at the house there. Once I was past, one of the men called out in a wheedling voice, "Hey, Ringo -- why are you just walking by without saying hi? Come on back and talk to us." With "Ringo" written on my back, I knew he was talking to me, and I shot a bewildered look back over my shoulder at them, and the two men were chuckling and leering at me. I turned my eyes back forward and all I could think was, "Do you not know I'm twelve?" 

I know I got the mail and that I then needed to decide whether to walk back past these men to get home or whether I should take some crazy long way to avoid them. For perspective:

And here's the crazy thing: I want to say that I don't remember whether I walked back past them or not, but that's not exactly true; I can actually remember doing both perfectly well. I can remember wanting to see if that creepy old guy would talk to me again (hoping he would; hoping he wouldn't) if I walked by and working up the nerve and doing it; I even remember him sounding less jokey and more threatening this time. I can also clearly remember that I decided to walk up to Elm Rd and go totally out of my way to not risk looking like I was wanting more interaction (side note: I know Main Street looks like the shorter route but it was actually a highway without sidewalks; not nice for walking along). I honestly don't know which version is true.

I can't imagine a more innocent looking outfit on a young girl going about her innocent business; what was the deal with this guy? I've written here before about the time that two of my male teachers remarked in front of me that I have "bedroom eyes" (an event that came half a year after the present story), I wrote before about my Dad's friend Garth creeping me out by telling me that I look good when I have my hands in my pockets (can't find the story, but that was pretty much it and it also happened around this time), and I also once wrote about how later this same summer my Dad trimmed off my carefully groomed fingernails against my will (also can't begin to imagine where I wrote that down), and the common thread seems to be that adult men were beginning to recognise that I was growing up and that was an ambivalent experience for me -- I wanted attention but was totally embarrassed by it, and when quasi-sexual attention was coming from inappropriate sources, I was totally confused; I wanted/didn't want it and felt that same depth and lightness that Zoe described in the story; like having your body fall backwards down an elevator shaft while your mind stretches back to ground level.

Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue

'Cause you know darling I love only you

You never know it hurt me so, how I hate to see you go

Don't pass my by, don't make me cry

In the same way that Beatles fans don't really take Ringo's only writing credit very seriously, I don't know how seriously I was supposed to take a grown man catcalling -- Oh, don't pass me by, Ringo! -- when I was still more child than woman. I was twelve. Nothing could be more humiliating than a body. Although the memory of this day is still vaguely shameful for me, even if I was the teasing Lolita that Humbert Humbert accused his nymphet of being (which she obviously wasn't; which I wasn't; one afternoon in a tube top was the sexiest I ever dressed in my life), what was this guy thinking? What were my teachers or my Dad's friend thinking? Were the 70s a different (worse) time, or are there grown men today making twelve-year-old girls squirm under the focus of their attentions? As a mother on the other side now, I can only fear and try to give out warnings and watch helplessly, my mouth twitching with contradictory emotions.