Loose Leaf Notes

1. Wherever we go and whenever we’re on vacation, I look for Botanical Gardens to visit.

2. We hit the jackpot when we found that the Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Fla was featuring an exhibition on George Harrison’s life as a gardener with vignettes recreated from his Frair Park estate.

3. The first exhibit we saw was labeled ‘If Not Fern You.’ This one was ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’

4. Harrison wanted to retire from the Beatles’ identity and in 1970 bought Friar Park, a grand Victorian gothic mansion with spectacular gardens that had fallen into disrepair. While revitalizing the property he found his love of gardening and began to describe himself by saying, “I’m just a gardener.”

5. The gardens at Friar Park were medieval gardens, which meant they included mazes, topiary, sundials, garden gnomes and rock gardens.

6. I made it out of the maze and then we spent some time looking for gnomes, which we were told were scattered throughout the exhibit. Although some of George’s garden gnomes were 3 feet tall, I don’t think this guy fits the gnome category. I call this “Get Back.”

7. This is more like it.

8. “Here on the shore, twenty years later, my message in a bottle has reached dry land.” Harrison’s wife Olivia came from England to help set up “A Gardeners Life” exhibition at Selby Gardens. Excerpts from her poems for George were displayed in the gardens. The above is one was my favorite.

9. The gulf was too cold to swim in but I swam in the heated pool every day, saw the sunset every evening and spent a lot of time watching and filming the immense flocks of seabirds.

10. I love a vacation when the only thing to do is swim, walk the beach, read a good book and decide what to have for dinner.

11. Arriving home to the Roanoke airport Friday night from a week in Siesta Key, we headed to Dogtown to dance to Grateful Dead music with the KIND.  I’ve decided that my new catch phrase is going to be ‘you just gotta poke around,’ a line from Shakedown Street. More HERE.

12. All Things Must Pass –  From the book I wrote about my brothers’ deaths in the summer of 2001:  “It’s not always going to be this grey…All things must pass away…  George Harrison died this morning (November 30, 2001) at the age of 58 after a long battle with cancer, the TV newscasters reported.  Another causality in a season of death.  Another nail in the coffin of our youth.  Another opening up of the wound from losing Jim and Dan.  Watching George be memorialized is to remember what we just went through.  Looking at old clips of the Beatles is like looking through our own family album.  I see the innocence of Jim and Dan in the Beatle’s young faces.  I see our past selves in their 60’s clothes and long hair.  I see Jimmy who brought the first Beatle album home, “It’s the Beatles.”  I hear the music coming from our bedrooms.  I see the Beatles posters on my walls. I remember my heart beating faster while watching them on the Ed Sullivan show.  I know all the words to their songs.

I first heard of George’s death on the VA/MA Love Link.  My brother Bobby wrote: “At work, at 3 a.m. this morning, I heard on the radio that George Harrison had died.  I started to cry.  I’ve been crying off and on for four hours and I need to tell people what’s coming up for me. I lived with Danny in 1980 when John Lennon was killed. I saw him cry…he was broken up.  So this morning I remember this and then I think…Dan is dead. It’s like all bunched into one big thing that’s tearing me up.  They’ve been playing Beatles and Harrison songs all morning.  It keeps bringing me back to…Dan is dead.”

Death doesn’t discriminate.  Neither does love.  Both happen to the famous and the non-famous, and everyone who is loved is famous to those who love them. We cry when a Beatle dies because we all grew up together, because we see ourselves in them, because they remind us of our own immortality, and because Jim and Dan loved the Beatles. We know they would be crying too.” –The Jim and Dan Stories can be read here on Looseleaf. Introduction HERE. 

13. Jasmine or Gardenia?  More on our Winter Siesta on Siesta Key HERE. 

__________Thirteen Thursday