Ob-La-Di, Ob, La, Da, Life goes on

Junior  highly commended

Niamh Keady-Tabbal, Seamount College Kinvara

Junior  highly commended

Niamh Keady-Tabbal, Seamount College Kinvara

1020 Pier Avenue. 90405

Every Saturday we took the long route to the beach on foot, my parents and I. Stopping at every park, swinging on every swing, singing every Beatles song we knew.
I had every Beatles cd from A-Z. The white album, Yellow Submarine and every colour in between. I studied the album covers and knew every minor detail of each Beatles face. I’d mimic Paul’s eyes, Ringo’s sulk and George’s mouth askew. My favourite Beatle was John Lennon.
I have no idea how I mimiced his face.
I dragged my parents away from the dishes and gardening and made them guess. “what beatle am I?”, I would ask, and pull a face. They were right every time.
My lucky number was two. I was born on October second. I had two last names, I was always the second shortest and second youngest in my class, and the second child in my class that wasn’t Mexican.
It was 2003, 1st grade in Will Rogers learning community, Santa Monica California.
The carpet was made up of squares and they spelt the rainbow. When the bell rang at the end of my my first day, the chain link gate rolled open and hundreds of students poured out into the sunshine.
Thirty percent were White, twelve percent were Black, five percent Pacific Islander and one percent were Native American. I wondered what percent were Irish-Lebanese.
My mom stood at the gate, she was speaking to a large woman with a smokestack of frizzy black and silver hair, the biggest I had ever seen.
The woman’s face was too high up for me to see, but I knew I liked her. I tapped her on the elbow.
“ Which Beatle am I?” I tried them all out on her – Paul, George, John and Ringo- She got all four right.
The following September, the woman was my teacher. She left her hair down mostly.
Her face was luminous, both round and angular, her slightly slanted brown eyes behind round wire-rimmed glasses.
She was the only person as obsessed with The Beatles as I had been.
In class, she sat contently in her rocking chair, while we gathered in a circle at her feet and read our stories aloud. I felt sorry for the children who read out punctuation. “I went to the park, comma” And I pitied the boy who couldn’t speak, comma, or at least never did. Full stop.
We painted in the psychedelic colours that matched the Beatles lyrics. The sharpest lime, the most fluorescent pink.
School ended too quickly. My classmates left, the room was cool and blue in their absence. I was a little slower in packing my bag, and in no hurry to go home. My loneliness was nocturnal.
My teacher called my name and pointed to the corner of the classroom. There on the bookshelf, next to an autographed photo of Ringo Starr, was a shiny silver stone. The word ‘Imagine’ was engraved into it.
I went out to the garden and tiptoed down the creaky wooden steps, brushing against the morning glories that wove around the railing, strangling the sundried wood.
I climbed up the avocado tree, leaving my cardigan hanging from a stumpy branch.
I climbed higher and higher until I was level with the neighbouring condo building windows. I pierced my head through the blanket of rubbery foliage and looked over the wall. The people there kept turtles named after tropical fruit. They built their own motor vehicles and had crazy, out of control tupperware parties.
At the top, I looked the other way, toward the hazy city and the boundless blue sea. I remember that view, and the endless hum of cars, people driving everywhere. Their lives went on while I felt mine was over. It was two days since my mother had passed away.
I reached into my pocket to make sure the imagine stone was still there.
My teacher knew lots of things. She knew my secret middle name (I have two) that wasn’t even on my birth cert. She knew how to transform the classroom into the amazon rainforest. She pulled popsicle stick names from a cup and told us stories about her childhood in Mexico. She convinced her brother he could fly, and encouraged me to write. She knew enough to sit me with the boy who never spoke. Helped me in a way no-one else knew how.
Two weeks had passed, I was sick of the visits paid to us by neighbours and worn out by relations showing up with tinfoil covered platters of consolation.
On Halloween morning, I woke up early as usual and went out to the garden. The air was fresh and filled with the cumbersome groan of the leaf blowers as they rid the street of autumn’s withered leaves.
There was a pumpkin on our fence. I went to investigate. It was as big as my head and already carved. Instead of a face, huge block letters encircled the width and spelled out one word: IMAGINE.
“John Lennon was here! John Lennon was here”.
“It was John Lennon” I told my classmates, later in the day. One of the world’s most famous musicians had delivered me a Halloween pumpkin, twenty years after his death. There was no explanation more likely.
Before the school year finished, we were moving to Ireland. My father decided it was important to raise me closer to my mother’s family.
I hadn’t imagined any of it. I hadn’t known I had so many cousins or that Cadbury’s was so easy to get.
School was different, the desks we sat at had inkwells and mushrooms sprouted from the damp lino in the corner of the classroom. My second class teacher told me my painting of an “octupus’ garden” was “ too giddy”
I never imagined a whole country of people who could pronounce my name, I thought I was doomed to a life of answering to “Neeama-huh”.
My new road was lined with shiny blackberries and two donkeys lived at the end of it. I wrote and told all of this to my old classmates. The boy who never spoke wrote back.
I started piano lessons. The teacher appeared on the doorstep. “Knock, knock knock,” he said instead of ringing the bell or knocking.
His yellow ladybird patterned gardening clogs contrasted with his posh accent. His silver hair was laboriously forced into a tiny ponytail and wore an oversized woolly jumper with a long, sparkly, scarf.
The first song he taught me was Imagine. (Full stop)