Kimberly Chalmers
Strawberry Fields 
(Forever)
 

To the scrawny woman in an old coat with patches of her hair missing, Strawberry Fields is an emblem of rock ‘n’ roll. There are leaves on the mosaic, a black-and-white circle which simply states “Imagine.”  The woman doesn’t like the presence of the debris.  She angrily sweeps them away, screaming to herself and everyone that “nobody cares about rock ‘n’ roll anymore!”  She doesn’t work for the park, and she’s not entirely sane.  But Strawberry Fields is hers. To the white male tourist with a Nikon camera around his neck and his pregnant Asian wife at his side, Strawberry Fields is an emblem of the success of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s interracial love -- despite the societal difficulties they went through because of it.  They see me sitting on one of the memorial benches, notice I’m half Asian, and smile at me.  We’re strangers, but here we know each other; even though they’re probably only five years older than I am, they are my parents and I am their child.  Strawberry Fields is theirs. To fifteen-year-old me, Strawberry Fields was an emblem of home. The first time I visited, on what would have been John Lennon’s sixtieth birthday, was the first time I was truly happy in public.  I was surrounded by strangers, by smoke, by freezing night air, and by love -- to quote Lennon in his 1967 song Across the Universe, “limitless undying love, which shines around me like a million suns and calls me on and on, across the universe.”  All night the other Beatles fans and I sang songs together, screaming our hearts out and openly expressing our limitless, undying love for John Lennon, and in turn, our love for each other -- because people who love John Lennon that much have something deeper in common than the light enjoyment of a well-crafted harmony.  Strawberry Fields was mine, and it is mine. An unobtrusive teardrop-shaped plot of land on the west side of Central Park, Strawberry Fields serves as a memorial and a passageway.  It is across the street from the Dakota building on seventy-second street and Central Park West where Lennon lived from 1975 to 1980, and was funded by Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono in honor of their dedication to the site, their love, and the love Lennon’s fans hold for him.  Named after Lennon’s own favorite Beatles song, Strawberry Fields Forever, in which he famously sings of his confusion about identity “No one I think is in my tree / I mean it must be high or low,” the site simultaneously pays homage to Lennon’s life, his death, his fans, his family, and his childhood in Liverpool -- which he spent living next to another Strawberry Field.  This one was a Salvation Army home in Woolton, and according to Paul McCartney, “we related it to youth, golden summers, and fields of strawberry” (670).  Strawberry Fields reminds the public of many different things. To the large groups of Japanese tourists that visit daily and to Beatles fans like myself, its significance is clear; to residents of the Upper West Side who enjoy taking their dogs on walks in the Park, the meaning is a little less obvious.  To John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the site was a pretty and convenient place to take walks and to bring their son Sean; to the hundreds of distraught Lennon fans who gathered there on December 8, 1980 to pay the first vigil to their fallen hero, the site was as close as they could get to each other -- other people who understood -- on the night of his death. The reason that John Lennon fans love Strawberry Fields is that it’s on the Upper West Side, across the street from the building in which Lennon lived out the last five years of his existence -- the only truly peaceful years of his life.  He hid from the public and shed his rebellious image; he grew up and became able to write not Yer Blues (“Yes I’m lonely -- wanna die”) or Gimme Some Truth (“I’m sick to death of seeing things from tight lipped-condescending-mommies little chauvinists”), but Watching the Wheels: “I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round / I really love to watch them roll / no longer riding on the merry-go-round / I just had to let it go.”  Lennon’s fans love him because he spent his entire life exposing his vulnerability and pain to the entire world, and they love Strawberry Fields because it is where their hero finally found happiness.  In her essay on the idealized male role model throughout the twentieth century, The Courage of Intimacy: Movie Masculinity in the Nineties, Clara Lee notes, “…[A] hero cannot always save the day in a conventional sense….we even appreciate his failure because it has knocked all of his arrogance out of him and left only an exposed, vulnerable character” (29).  This is what John Lennon’s fans love about him, and this is what they celebrate together on the anniversaries of Lennon’s birth and death every year; they gather, just as vulnerable as Lennon, to cry, laugh, and sing together all night.  Strawberry Fields vigils are seventh-grade slumber parties for all New York Beatles fans -- the people we are with soothe our insecurities because we are all the same.  We all are struggling to find ourselves in the city where John Lennon did it, and we all sorely miss a man we’ve never met.  Public space becomes a source of private comfort, and a sense of really belonging among strangers who, for two nights a year, are our best friends and closest peers. How special, though, is Strawberry Fields?  Is it really so difficult to find comfort in a public space?  Andre Aciman writes on Straus Park in his essay Shadow Cities because to him, the park symbolizes “an oasis of the soul” (497).  Aciman writes from an immigrant’s perspective and notes that public space which supplies a source of regularity and ritual are what give “exiles” roots (495).  Although Aciman writes passionately about Straus Park in particular, his ideas can easily apply to any public space one regularly visits and sees, as long as things don’t change: “I wanted everything to remain the same…This, too, is typical of people who have lost everything, including their roots or their ability to grow new ones….[Straus Park] became my habit, and eventually my habitat.” (495-500).  Aciman faces difficulties when stores change names or parks are remodeled, but he does not have very much trouble finding a place to feel at home in public -- quite unlike Brent Staples.  Staples, in his essay Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space, presents his realization that as a young black man, he can never truly feel or create comfort in public.  He remembers the first time a white woman ran at the sight of him and reflects, “That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians -- particularly women -- and me” (602).  In order to decrease the tension between himself and the strangers he encounters late at night, Staples “move[s] about with care” and whistles classical music on the street as he walks (605).  While Aciman’s theory implies that “exiles” can easily find comfort in public, Staples’ experience shows that some people must go to certain lengths in order to even exist without a wall of tension following them everywhere.  I wonder which group of people the Strawberry Fields crowd belong to -- do they gravitate to the site and Lennon simply because its ritual creates a sense of home, or do they escape to the site because they really can’t feel comfortable in daily life?  It’s probably a mix; like Aciman, I love Strawberry Fields because it constantly reminds me of things I love.  However, the guy dressed up like Chairman-Mao-button-era Lennon, carrying a candle and chanting “the dream is over” probably belongs to the second group of people. Nevertheless, in either case, people -- myself included -- find comfort in their own, and Lennon’s, vulnerability at Strawberry Fields.  The same way that young John Lennon found his own lonely tree in Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon’s fans find a place to sing, yearn, and cry together in Lennon’s New York City.  They (we) find our hero in the space and in ourselves; we find that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t dead, and most importantly, we find that in New York City, it is sometimes possible to be surrounded by strangers and to truly not be alone.      Works Cited Staples, Brent.  “Just Walk on by: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space,” in Writing the Essay/Art in the World/The World Through Art, ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, with Pat C. Hoy II.  McGraw-Hill, New York: 2003. Aciman, Andre.  “Shadow Cities,” in Writing the Essay/Art in the World/The World Through Art, ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, with Pat C. Hoy II.  McGraw-Hill, New York: 2003. Lee, Clara.  “The Courage of Intimacy: Movie Masculinity in the Nineties,” in Mercer Street. The Beatles: The Beatles Anthology.  San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000. Lennon, John and Paul McCartney: Strawberry Fields Forever, single, Northern Songs Ltd., 1967. Lennon, John and Paul McCartney: Yer Blues, from “The Beatles,” Apple Records, 1968. Lennon, John, and Paul McCartney: Across the Universe, from “Let It Be,” Apple Records, 1970. Lennon, John: Gimme Some Truth, from “Imagine,” Lenono Music Publishing, 1971. Lennon, John: Watching the Wheels, from “Double Fantasy,” Lenono Music Publishing, 1980.   (c)Kimberly Chalmers 2004

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