Black Friday, 5:55 a.m., sidewalk outside the Best Buy on McKnight Road. Hundreds of us were being given final instructions on how not to behave like animals once inside. Pushing and shoving would not be tolerated, nor would "gyping" anyone. "I'll call the cops," said our proctor.
Forty-nine years old and I'm up in the middle of the night heeding warnings about getting drilled by a bargain-crazed soccer mom should I get between her and Best Buy's marked-down DVD-VCR stock.
This isn't what got me thinking about George Harrison, but I did wonder what the Beatle who never seemed to ask for anything nor necessarily want anything would say about an imminent consumer feeding frenzy on a cold American sidewalk.
"It's [crap]," it turns out he'd say. Or at least he said it somewhere in the 368 chaotic pages of "The Beatles Anthology." "You can be a multimillionaire and have everything you can think of in life, and it's [crap] -- you're still going to die. You can go through life, go through millions of lives, and not even catch on to what the purpose is. . . . You can be standing right in front of the truth and not necessarily see it, and people only get it when they're ready to get it."
Today's small truth is that George Harrison died one year to the day from that highly inconsequential moment on the sidewalk, and I miss him, and I didn't even know I was missing him until he started turning up unexpectedly in my psychic sphere a couple of weeks ago. I know. You hate when that happens.
Dead Beatle karma. Oh, it's out there. It started in a conversation I was having with a friend about colleges, in which he mentioned that at Brown, his sister dated the son of George Harrison.
"Was he real tan, too?" I said stupidly, thinking he'd said George Hamilton.
"No Harrison," he said. "The Beatle."
"The Quiet Beatle," I said, or should have.
In Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser's book, "A Dictionary of Musical Quotations," there are 25 from Beethoven, four from John Lennon, one from Paul McCartney, one from Ringo Starr, and none from George Harrison. And yet Harrison's music seemed to have so much to say, and so earnestly.
About a week after the Hamilton-Harrison dialogue, I was trying to relearn the alarm functions of my clock radio, erased in a severe brain cramp, and decided the alarm should sound via compact disc. I went downstairs and literally swiped the first CD I could get my hands on. It was "The Best of George Harrison."
The morning after the sidewalk incident, I was reading the Post-Gazette cover-to-cover and had just leaned into the always informative Almanac on page 2 when I learned of the one-year anniversary of Harrison's death from cancer at 58. His will, made public only last week, was that his wife and son, the Brown alum, receive his mansion and $155 million, which is, to be sure, a lot of crap for one so crap-sensitive.
That figure is likely dwarfed by contributions, in money, property and inspiration, he bestowed for some 30 years on his Material World Charitable Foundation, which supports the arts and provides training and funding for people who work with the poor and the sick.
Not at all bad for a Liverpool kid whose house had no bathroom, who couldn't scare up the 15 shillings it took to see Bill Haley and the Comets on tour there, and whose first accomplishment of consequence was informing John Lennon that a guitar had six strings, not four.
The upshot for these much smaller truths is that while some of us are fortunate never to have had to say, "This is the first Thanksgiving without Mom," or Dad or whomever, last week was indeed we boomers' first Thanksgiving without George Harrison, which I'd have thought until recently to be the lamest kind of trivia.
But that "Best of" CD, which starts with Ringo's seven distinct thumps that trigger Harrison's masterful "Something" -- I have let it spin on and on when it wakes me, and then I take it with me during the day. Not sure why. But George was sure why.
"Music has always had a transcendental quality inasmuch as it reaches part of you that you don't expect it to reach, and it can touch you in a way that you can't express," he says in that same "Anthology." "You can think that it hasn't reached you, and years later you'll find it coming out."
Small wonder that George was the first and best Beatle at seeing through the crap, at understanding everyone's profound insignificance. The day after Harrison died, my brother sent me an e-mail with the following Harrison lyrics, which pretty much explain everything, except possibly what in the hell I was doing on the Best Buy sidewalk at 5:55 a.m.:
We were talking
About the love that's gone so cold
And the people
Who gain the world but lose their soul...
Then you may find peace of mind
Is waiting there and the time will come
When you will see we are all one
And life flows on within you and without you.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
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