Self-Portrait - Melody Cryns

How weird to see the words “self-portrait” as I sit here and look at my graduation picture proofs, sent to me in the mail last night so that I can decide if I want to order any of them. Of course my graduation hat or whatever it’s called is cocked to one side and falling off my head – it doesn’t sit on my head the way it does on everyone else’s – towards the front. I remember when I was in high school, I always envied the girls with the beautiful, long silky hair that they wore parted in the middle and it would fall just right – while my hair was wild, thick and unkempt and wouldn’t lay right like that – I’d always have to pull it back in a half pony-tail or do something with it. It’s like, why couldn’t I look like the rest of the girls in high school? Why couldn’t I be like any of them?

And there I was 35 years later – after graduating from high school in the huge football field at Washington High in San Francisco up on the hill – trying to get the cap to fit on my head right, but it just wouldn’t work.

I like to think that in the past 52 years, I’ve grown and changed and perhaps learned a few things a lot the way. I’m sure I have, but then again, I’ve always surrounded myself with music and pictures of the Beatles and that has never changed.

As I sit here listening to the Beatles songs on the radio, I find myself wondering why the Beatles are such a big part of my life – why their pictures surround me at home, their music envelops me and how their music seems to follow me wherever I go – if not Beatles music, then some music and it all relates and comes back to them – the Beatles.

When an era ends, a new one begins – and somehow, some way I can’t let the spirit of the Beatles and everything they stand for die – no matter what I must do, I’ve got to keep the spirit alive. Tomorrow is my son Stevie’s 29th birthday – I like to think that I’ve kept his spirit alive somehow, some way.