Abbey Road, 1970

I listened to the Abbey Road album recently, and it brought me right back to 1970; the people, the feelings, the times. I worked at what then was the Kodak plant on Elmgrove Road from July to August that summer, most of the time riding my bike to work the 6-2:30 shift if I remember correctly. The job was packaging Instamatic camera packs (camera, flash cube, wrist cord) as they rolled down the assembly line. (Dull job, relatively good pay.) We took the same positions each day on the line and therefore got to spend a lot of hours, for better or worse, with those beside and across from us. The first and most adamantly conveyed lesson I learned was not to work too fast, not to be more productive than the "regulars" who would be there when we went back to school and didn't want their quotas increased. The second lesson was not to retrieve usable stuff from the trash because the guards at the exits will take you for a thief.

The Beatles run had come to an end and their final album was unlike any other. They were no longer singing the kinds of songs they sang in the earlier days. They seemed to be in a very different place than they had been in the mid-60's. Listening to it 50 years later, it is still stunningly moving.

It so happens that around the time I started working at Kodak, soon after the 4th of July, I was rocked hard by what Dylan might call "a phone call most foul". Of all the things I've experienced in my life, that call probably is up there with the most profoundly hurtful events I've known. It changed me for awhile making me feel a bit afraid that the world could change in an instant from what it was to what it is to be going forward. It changed my inner sense of what was reliable, or for that matter, even what was known. It was a tough call that took years to absorb and process. I think, in the end, what took the edge off it was time and experience enough to realize that such shocking changes are just part of life and something we learn to absorb.

So the songs of Abbey Road, as memorable and inspiring as they are, have an association that is hard to revisit, but at the same time, now, as then, they help me work through and past that call.


And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.