CNN iReport

I was eleven years old, and had the perm that just didn't turn out right, thick purple glasses with rose pink tinted lenses, and a thick Mexican accent.  I was a year younger than anyone else in my class and had been taken out of the school in the neighborhood, and bussed to a middle school for a media magnet program.  It was there that, among other forms of social torture, I was coerced into making video book reports that were broadcast in front of the whole school during homeroom, securing my nerd status.  So, not only was I the dork of the school, but invisible to the neighborhood kids who all knew each other. I didn't fit in anywhere.

We were on a tight budget, and my entertainment was basically whatever the library had.  It was there that, for some reason, I picked up a cassette of The Beatles 20 Greatest Hits. 

Finally, someone who understood how I felt! And I understood them! I had FRIENDS!  I'd cry during "Yesterday" because I believed in it too.  English was my favorite class, so it was obvious "Paperback Writer" was about me.  I was going to find Penny Lane some day when I finally left Montgomery Middle School.  "We Can Work it Out" was about the Gulf War.  "The Long and Winding Road" was the song my imaginary boyfriend wrote to serenade me after an imaginary argument... all 20 songs were about me or had some place in my imagination.

I was still the neighborhood geek, but at least now I was a geek with a soundtrack. 

I never did buy the album, but I have the songs from having other albums.  And, the same way I closed myself up in my room with the Beatles for hours at a time when I just didn't fit in at school,  they provided my soundtrack when I had rough days in high school, and college, after the death of my son, during my mom's battle with cancer, and after every other heartbreak.

Their songs have held up for me the last nineteen years, and will continue to hold up as long as there times in my life when I feel like a purple poodle-haired four-eyed bookworm that just can't seem to fit in.