No. 684 – Free as a Bird

Performer: The Beatles

Songwriters: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starkey

Original Release: Anthology 1

Year: 1995

Definitive Version: None

There’s some irony for you—ending the last blog with the word trapped and then the next song starts with the word free. I’m not clever enough to have done that on purpose.

Anyway, I know any self-respecting Beatles fan will grab for their barf bag over this choice, but it clicked with me when it came out. At the time, I had just become more or less free of Dad’s family after Debbie and I moved in together. Debbie’s family more than made up for any gap.

Debbie was very close to her family, and back then most of extended family lived close enough that we saw them all the time—at least once and sometimes twice a month, on Sundays.

We would go over to Debbie’s sister’s house for some serious down-home cookin’ and shootin’ the breeze, although I mostly kept my yapper shut. Debbie’s family could get pretty boisterous, and I learned that it was better to just stay out of it and listen.

Christmas was our big hosting duty. Debbie always had had her family to her place on Christmas Eve, and we continued that after we moved in together. The first Christmas Eve in 1995 we had 20 people in our apartment. It’s a good thing the living room and kitchen were open, great-room style. I don’t know how we would have done it otherwise.

It also turned out that that Christmas was the only one that I was able to fully attend, due to work and a typical lack of vacation days at the end of the year. In later years, I would come home on my dinner break long enough to say hi and grab some party grub before heading back to work.

After the first holiday, my Christmas present from Debbie’s sister, Pat, was always the same—a homemade apple pie, which is my favorite desert (heated with ice cream). And let me tell you, Pat’s apple pie is the best in the world, so that was as good a Christmas present as I could get. I’d hide it as soon as I got it, so no one else would be tempted to sneak a slice.

Debbie used to say afterward that although she loved doing it, she also was glad that it was once a year. She could take her extended family all together—particularly the kids when they got wound up—in small doses, and I agreed. But they accepted me right away, no questions asked. I was thankful for that at a time when my family was just the opposite.