George Harrison Was My Father

you don’t believe me and there isn’t any reason you should when I tell you that George Harrison, lead guitarist, formidable meditator, and member of the first Brit wave, super pop group, the Beatles, was my father, but it’s true. it was he who taught me how to love a woman while gently weeping, that there is something in the way, and not in the Kurt kind of way, but in the way she moves, that within you there is the same universe as there is outside of you, or, as George always said to me, without you, but not in a Bono kind of way, not in such an extreme I can’t live without you or even with you kind of way, no, George was much more of a balanced troubadour, yes, whenever I would drop a grade at school he would just tut tut and mutter, “Isn’t it a pity,” which always made me feel like the sun was going away even though he also would always say it was coming here, and I just wondered how far it had to come and from where. there was a picture of George on the nightstand next to my mother’s bedside, it was taken when he was in India with Maharishi. George looks so young with a string of colorful flowers around his neck even though the photograph is black and white you can tell and George is smiling because he has realised his path to enlightenment is starting under that mustache and long hair or that he is already enlightened but now he is just beginning to wake up and Maharishi is smiling too like the Buddha getting photographed for publicity. the other side of my mother’s bed was often empty because of course George was on tour every year and playing concerts and generally just intensively meditating to escape the press but I knew the truth and when I became a teenager I started playing the guitar of course just like my father but I didn’t step out into the limelight like Paul or John, no, I just wanted to sit back comfortably and be adored and quietly esteemed for the graceful and mournful licks that I wove around the lyrics to our songs. but I have to say the inner light was all too much, and even though I stroked that photograph and missed my father, eventually there came a what is life moment where the face of my father, of George, dissolved into reality, and I realised that my true father was not in fact George but Groucho Marx.