This is a cautionary tale to all those men who think they have a secure marital relationship.  It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been married or how trusting and full of fidelity your spouse may seem.  Deep within her heart there is a secret.  There is a place where only one will go.  Even you have never been there, though you may have had the chance to or were there once long ago.  This “one” is the other guy you thought was harmless, that guy she fantasizes about.  Watch for him, and don’t think you have to hire a detective to go skulk around after her to see, to find out his name.  All you have to do is look around your home.  See him?  Plain as the nose on your face isn’t he?  If she’s done it well she’ll be hiding him in the most obvious place:  right smack in front of you…everyday.  Got it?  Understand…? 

Yeah, I didn’t either until she had completely slipped away.  No, we didn’t divorce over him and seldom argued about him; actually, I thought he was a bit of all right myself.  At least the guy that she’d based her imaginary lover on.  Yeah, you do know who it is don’t you?  Yup!  It’s that guy- that’s him, the unattainable, ultra impossible conquest.  You know his name now don’t you?  In my case, with my wife, it was John Lennon, and how, how I ask you, in God’s name could a man long since passed from this world steal her from me?  Because in my sad and woeful scenario, my friend, I let him!  Sure it’s my fault, half of it anyway. 

“Denial makes desire stronger.” 

That was my downfall.  Our friends, people who met us because of him would ask me:

“How do you deal with your wife loving John Lennon?” 

My answer:  ”He’s dead, not much of a threat.”

How wrong I was…

I want to tell you other poor soft-hearted husbands out there what to look for by sharing with you what I see so clearly, what could have been prevented had I listened, really listened. And maybe if I save just one guy from losing her to that other guy, the emptiness of my heart she once desired to fill won’t be in vain.

It started in 1995, during or shortly after the Beatles Anthology broadcast on ABC.  I don’t think she knew consciously then.  I certainly didn’t.  Married for twelve years, and I thought I’d seen the worst of our challenges fade into the past.  It wasn’t like we didn’t know each other well before we got married in 1983.  We’d grown up in different parts of the country but met in 1980, both of us age 16, working at the same amusement park in Texas.  I’d stolen her heart from a guy I thought was a panty-waist fop.  She did too, apparently, because when he left to go to college in West Germany, we dated that whole year.  You know, Bob Seger was right, “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

“Then” I was the guy who captured her heart for my own, and I know she still loves me on a very special level, deep and sincere.  What I also had then, that I let slip away, was her soul, her mind, her every creative urging and romantic passion… That’s what Lennon took from me!  That’s what my policy of “Denial makes desire stronger” got me.

I should have seen it coming in 1998, early in January.  She started writing a story about him and wrote herself in, naturally, as the female lead falling for John head over heels during the Beatles’ early days while performing in Hamburg, Germany.  Yeah, I knew about the story- all of it- and no, I didn’t go digging into her notebooks and computer disks.  God knows it would’ve been easy enough, I was a computer whiz kid and I still have my own part-time web developing business.  No, I didn’t need to do that at all.  Would you believe she read every single blessed word to me?  Again, I don’t think she was conscious of it at the time but hindsight being what it is I’m sure she saw it way before me.  I think it was at this point in early 1998 that she was trying to tell me how she wanted ME to romance her!  Yeah- that’s 20-20 now.  I see that she was, in her obtuse and subtle way, trying to hint me through how to get me to the places where John Lennon had been playing in her imagination and precisely how to do it.  Maybe I’ve confused you, it wasn’t the text itself that was subtle and obtuse.  It was downright pornographic, and, pardon my pun, laid out in most descriptive and elaborately detailed terms what lovemaking was for her.  What I missed was what she was feeling and not saying.  What I know now was “please do these things to me and rekindle our romance!”  I realize now that in March of ’98 she still wanted me in that innermost secret place of her heart.  I won’t lie either we did have some fantastic sex during this period, and frequently.  She wrote more and read me more, I listened and we made love.  Yet, I still didn’t seem to get it.  I mean, what was there to get?  We were married, it was hot, and Lennon was fine with me if that was the unattainable star fantasy she needed to get going.

How could I know what was going on in her mind?  I always told her I wasn’t a mind reader and that’s why it’s her fault too. 

By the time she finally did tell me what all the reading of that first story was about, she’d written more, much more, and I hadn’t heard it because to her I wasn’t listening.  Now it was 2000, I’d landed a major paying job down in south Texas.  We bought a new house and she didn’t have to work.  We’d been to Liverpool and London the previous spring.  It was like going to Mecca for her.  I saw some wonderful Titanic displays too at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool.  We called it our second honeymoon.  Truthfully, it was her pilgrimage to soak in the places John had remembered and the history of his life and the story of the Beatles.  I recall her worrying on the flight that maybe she’d built it all up more than it was.  I suppose I should’ve been hoping it would be a let down.  It wasn’t.  The entire vacation was a splendidly incredible time for her.  Scrawling in her journals, our new laptop computer went with us.  I took pictures for her with my digital camera.  I even took some 35mm shots in black and white.  I didn’t deny her a thing and she was extremely appreciative.  Our love reached a deeper level at this time, I know that for sure. What I didn’t know was that the fire I’d built with her for 16 years, though stable and strong, was being overpowered by a force of infinite passion and unobtainable desires. 

If our trip overseas only confirmed her passions and affection for John more, the poetry she began to write in earnest as we lived in southern Texas concretized images only she could see.  She started to seek out spiritualists and learned to meditate.  She took to visiting a shop devoted to all things esoteric and attended classes on spirit guides and angel messengers.  The poetry continued flowing, unchecked and even encouraged by me, sorry to say now.  She read some of these to me and even self published a couple of poetry books to share with her growing number of friends in the world of Spiritualism.  I worked on the second one because the first was a miserable graphic effort to say the least.  I attended as many promotions as I could, helped her spread the word -love.  Again I denied her nothing and offered my complete support.  I don’t think I was stupid to do this.  I love her and always will.  Yes, I knew the poems were chiefly about Lennon, and such imagery I didn’t think any man could inspire.  She went so far as to change some of the lines in poems to mask they were about him, but I knew. 

Yet, even after all this I was still blind to the distancing of her innermost, sacred loving thoughts and emotions.  Like quicksand I didn’t see, she was sinking, escaping my emotional grasp but then she never raised a hand to be saved.  She never thought she needed me to save her.  In her mind, John had already done so.   Maybe it was being laid off from that fantastic job at the end of 2001, being on unemployment and having to scramble to keep our lives together on a daily basis that caused my blindness.  September 11 that year put so many in unexpected spirals and tailspins of emotional fright.  Not that she didn’t help, she wasn’t oblivious to the horrors of that fall.  In my particular situation her response was quite the contrary, she understood that being laid off was no fault of mine.   She encouraged me, stood by my side when other women may have been fed up and walked out.  She kept a job she hated in a most repressive environment.  We had made a few good friends and they helped keep our hopes up too.  We ended up selling the beautiful house for a decent profit and moved back to the community we had originally left in 2000.  It seemed a step backward, but my wife was a dreamer, just like her beloved John Lennon, and her dream was just beginning to become real.

August 2002 saw us re-establishing in Dallas.  Our trials we left 250 miles to the south but we brought back a love stronger and deeper than we’d left with in 2000.  I had to congratulate myself just a little for my “nothing denied” policy regarding Lennon and the Beatles.  We’d survived much, she’d written volumes, and I felt a part of her inner world.  She told me it didn’t matter if I believed she had a creative connection to John Lennon’s soul, only that I believed that she believed.  I laughed at her reference to an old, old John Denver film “Oh, God!”  Honestly, I did think she was a bit touched to think such a thing but what did I care?  She’d let me in and all was right between us.  Today I know it was only temporary and nothing could prepare me for what happened in November of that year. 

She was hired for a position that seemed to be made to order for her.  It was. And I was delighted to see her so enthralled as she was previously crestfallen when she had to take a temp job at an insurance company.  But this marvelous tiny advertisement she spied by chance in the Sunday paper one week prompted her to drop the temp job like a hot potato.  With a bachelors degree in Broadcasting and experience from her early twenties, she confidently applied on the Internet and in person at the radio station.  She got the job as a disc jockey at the local oldies station, trained for three weeks and declared this was the work of her dreams.  I could scarce believe it myself.  Maybe there was something in her feelings of being “connected” to John.  The whole incident of her being hired the same day.  The quirk that the owner of the station was a Beatles fan and that the lyrics for “This Boy” penned by Lennon had just returned from the framers and was only in the office this one day- the day she was there- waiting for the owner to pick it up.  She was shown the prized piece of memorabilia and of course hit it off well with the owner when he arrived for his paper treasure.  “Instant Karma,” as my wife would laugh and say.  The other employees quickly labeled her as the station’s Beatles expert.  Although I know she preferred historian because “expert” meant to her you could never be wrong.  She also said for the first time since her senior year in high school she felt welcome and didn’t feel she had to hide her affection for John.  Had she been?  I wasn’t aware because there were always many pictures of John hanging in one room of our home since 1996.  To me that wasn’t hiding affection, but again I know now I wasn’t hearing what was being said or shown.  Though we had a relationship deepening in everyway in my eyes apparently there were depths of my wife’s heart that were closing off to me.  But perhaps they were never mine to claim because I hadn’t created them, John had.  These were his spaces alone, and resided where I dare not tread.  I only know this now because I see it in every line she wrote, every poem, every story and every journal entry that she never read to me.

Two years ago she was living a double life and it was staring me in the face everyday, every long night I worked at my computer in the office of our three-bedroom home.  During the day I’d go to my job with a small local manufacturer; I’m still there today.  She’d go to the station, working later in the afternoon and not coming home until late- sometimes 2am.  I’d be up but she’d be a tired from a “Hard Day’s Beatling,” she’d say, and float off to bed completely happy in her circumstance.  Naturally that made me happy too because all I ever wanted for her all her life was to be happy now she was at last and though we sacrificed our time together I felt it was worth the cost but I really didn’t know the price. 

She wasn’t writing as much, I don’t think, because now it was a rarity, if ever, for her to read anything to me much less to know if she was working on a piece.  Then again, I wasn’t paying much attention to her life without me because I was deep in resurrecting a business that seemed to be a lost cause.  I made it work and it’s a growing success now.  And believe it or not, she left the oldies station and her rock ‘n’ roll show to work with me!  She’d been helping when she could and decided to leave her dream to grow the business, our business with me.  This had to be the best of all signs.  Leaving the station was hard for her but it was worse two months later when the owner had to sell it.  It had been an oldies station format since we could remember.  Unfortunately, like many other stations across the state the large communications conglomerate Paxton purchased it.  Its format was changed to a Latin beat and they left the 15-odd employees who defied playing anything but pure rock ‘n’ roll out on the street.  I’ll tell you that even though she’d left only two months prior, she took the hit as hard as anyone who was there when the pink slips hit their desks. 

“I always figured I could go back and see everybody…” she’d lament.  Then she’d visit her former evening co-host, another Beatle fan (how could they not be best of friends?) or call another displaced D.J. to catch up.  After a while, she did it far less frequently than at first, but I know what the place meant to her and to watch a dream die…I know- I read how she retreated and I know just where she went for comfort…to him. 

It should’ve been me but I was too oriented towards the daily operations of the business, my responsibilities and she was always so open and helping, learning, doing.  We were together and yes, there was less intimacy because there is so much to tend to in a small operation.  We both did whatever was required to get the job done; pay bills, deposit checks, fill the order, make the product, write letters and make calls.  It wasn’t as thought we didn’t hug, go to lunch, hold hands, kiss, skip off an afternoon at the mall, we did!  And loved it!  So how could I see what she wouldn’t show me? 

I didn’t bother to ask, “So what have you been writing lately?”

I figured if she wanted me to know she’d tell me right?  Wrong!  And here my friend, I will urge you, implore you, plead you- Ask!   Ask, for god’s sake and for all you hold sacred, for her! Ask!  If she says “no,” then what can you do?  I didn’t ask my wife.  She said recently she was working on a story and would I like to hear it?  I wasn’t surprised but it had been some time; of course I said “Sure, I’d like to hear it.”  It was morning when she asked this, but the phone rang and business was underway.  She never mentioned it the rest of the day or that night.  Nor later that week or in the next month.  I have since realized she wanted me to ask her, to remind her to read it to me as it would have shown her I wanted to know and not that she was forcing me to listen.  So ask, make it plain that you want to hear it whatever it is, it’s better than not asking and only hearing the memory of her voice ringing in your head.

I waited too long to question what I didn’t know I was hearing without listening.  Hmm…October, her birthday would’ve been this month.  Her request of me to listen to her story was only three months ago.  It was what has become the memory of my last chance to listen and hear what was deep in her heart from her own lips.  Now regret sits where chance once was.  Now as I’ve read all those stories I see so clearly, so deftly that these were the places where she and John made a dream so real to her that she wandered off into that world one summer night just after I turned 42.  Now I can only read over and over to the last story, the last entry the last word- echoes of her love.  I hope John is listening to her stories where ever he is and taking care of her as he once told me to do in a dream I dismissed as nonsense.

Sharon Richards lives in Orlando, FL.  She holds a degree in Broadcasting but her heart is held by John Lennon.  Spending years as a video production assistant and a decade in corporate America one element was consistent, she was always writing. When her business writing collided unexpectedly with her passion for John Lennon’s music, an explosion of creativity resulted.  “I've never been so passionate," Sharon says. " Studying John Lennon changed all that.  Inspiration is certainly at the base of most of my work.  I hope Beatle fans are open to it and enjoy reading my poetry as much as I have enjoyed writing it."  Sharon can also be seen at most Beatlefests promoting her book, Drop Forged Lennon, and its successor due out October 9th --  Drop Forged Lennon- the Other Side.  Check out her website at www.dropforgedlennon.com for details and upcoming poetic happenings with Sharon.  

Tell Sharon Richards what you thought of her poems!