New Eyes New Ears

New Eyes New Ears: 15 July 2025

I’ve been nerding out over the Beatles. I sat riveted through Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary about the making of Let it Be, culminating with the rooftop concert that unwittingly became their final public performance. Then I watched Ron Howard’s documentary about their touring years. Then I read all their Wikipedia entries and watched A Hard Day’s Night and overloaded my Spotify feed. It’s been a great summer that way.

The Beatles were my first real band. Oh sure, I’d bought a few 45s along the way, (Nadia’s Theme, Reunited by Peaches and Herb, Sean Cassidy), and dabbled with a fleeting desire to be Andy Gibb’s Everything. But by 12 or 13, the Beatles had become my everything. That Christmas I asked for albums and only my brother, Billy, took the request seriously, buying me Seargent Pepper and Abbey Road.  I fell hard, memorized every song, read every liner note, eventually acquired every album.

I’d just bought Rubber Soul when my grandmother, whom we called Gomma, came for a visit. When guests came, they stayed in my room, so Gomma found me sitting on the floor by the record player. She asked what I was listening to and when I offered to play her a song she sat on the edge of the bed. I dropped the needle on In My Life. 

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain

All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends, I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all…..

She didn’t condescend but sat staring into the middle distance really listening. When the song ended, she looked down at me and said she liked it. She said, “It makes me think of Montreat.” At the time, I would have been about the age Gomma had been when she moved with her widowed mother and two younger brothers to live in Montreat. I wish I knew more of the story of her life there.

I wonder what she would make of it now. It seems different even to me. So many people! Such big houses! Occasional air conditioning! And some things my children and I consider sacrosanct traditions, like the Friday night Barn Dance and 4th of July parade, were still 50 years in the future when she arrived. Things have changed: some forever, some for better. And after Hurricane Helene, some have gone, though much remains.

It is a gift to have a multi-generational relationship with a place. When I’m grumpy or inconvenienced I sometimes bemoan the changes. But generally, I try to look for the beauty in the familiar, and God’s hand in the newness. I try to be open to and give thanks for the now. 

I like the way novelist Paul Theroux put it, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

I try to have new eyes.

This summer I’m also working on new ears, and I started with Ringo.

Ringo did not figure prominently in my Beatlemania. He was a little goofy, not as cute as Paul, as edgy as John, as new age as George. But my interest began more than a decade after the Beatles had broken up, and I only knew them through their music and static images. I was listening for the voices, the harmonies, the stories in the lyrics. Ringo and his drums were a pleasant background steadiness.

Somewhere I’d also picked up the notion that he wasn’t really a good drummer; that he was lucky to be around when the band needed a quick replacement for Pete Best. But now I completely disagree.

I’ve loved seeing footage and videos of the Beatles and learning more about the cultural context that surrounded them and that they helped to shape. Ringo is delightful! He’s witty. He’s mischievous but he doesn’t get dragged into the others’ drama. He learns and grows with the group until he’s contributing songs and ideas to each album. I read that he’d first started drumming while in a sanitorium recovering from tuberculosis. And as I watched him play, I suddenly began to hear him—his contribution, his instrument’s voice—and realized how important that voice was to the band.

So imagine my delight last week when the New York Times profiled Ringo ahead of his 85th birthday. He’s still playing, he’s still touring, and he’s still charming. He’s been married to Barbara Bach for 41 years and they’ve been sober for 37. And turns out, he’s a great drummer.

“ ‘His simplicity was complicated,’ said Sheila E., who studied Starr’s playing while on tour together. Beatles records, she said, always sounded like a conversation between four voices. ‘Those drum fills are not him trying to play a bunch of fills just to be heard,’ she said. ‘They land in a place where there was space and where they make sense.’ ”

‘“ ‘A lot of musicians learn licks and beats and modes and things like that, and then they just play within those,’ T Bone Burnett said. ‘Ringo is more of an art drummer, a literate drummer. He listens to what the song is saying, and then expresses that.’ Onstage in Nashville, he put it another way: ‘All the great musicians play the story. Ringo plays the words.’ ”

Listening for his voice in the drum parts has brought me a new appreciation for the Beatles as a whole and has challenged me to listen more intentionally to other music this summer, too.

Years ago, and not for the first or last time, Jack and I had a spat about getting out the door to go to school. On that particular day, though, it distracted us when we were passing the Ginko tree we’d been watching that Fall. Ginkos lose all their leaves in one day, or used to, before climate change, and we’d been checking each day as the leaves turned golden. I’d told him my Sewanee memories of watching another tree.

Walking to breakfast each morning I’d monitor my favorite Gingko until the first leaves began to fall and I’d declare it Gingko Day. After supper the last few leaves at the tippy top would dance in the evening breeze. And the next morning the bare tree reigned from the center of a lush golden carpet.

So Jack and I had been waiting for Ginko Day. But because of our spat, and not paying attention, we missed it. The next day the leaves were mostly fallen and had been blown around the neighborhood. It made me sad, and I said so. But Jack said, “I think it’s kinda cool. Because it happened even though we didn’t notice. Beautiful things are happening all the time, sometimes right beside us.”

 Sometimes we just need new eyes.  Or new ears.