Wide open spaces can sometimes be confining

The Beatles, as if they needed another superlative to add to their collection, starred in what many consider the best movie musical.

I refer, of course, to the 1964 film titled “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Released that fall at the height of Beatlemania, it was a huge success at the box office, not only because it featured six unreleased songs, but also because it showcased the band as adept screen presences, bright and witty, charming and utterly natural.

One of my favorite scenes — and there are so many from which to choose — simply shows the boys cavorting about a large, open field, running and jumping, shadowboxing and tumbling in the grass as “Can’t Buy Me Love” provides the soundtrack.

As the song fades, the camera zooms back to show a policeman staring them down, oozing contempt for their happy-go-lucky shenanigans, the very picture of austere, adult authoritarianism.

“I suppose you realize,” he sneers, “that this is private property.”

George Harrison, speaking for his mates and perhaps his generation, then delivers, with thinly veiled sarcasm, this line:

“Sorry we hurt your field, mister.”

That’s it. That’s the whole scene, but its brevity contains the movie’s essence — that the world was changing, and if you were too old, well, too bad. It wasn’t made for you, anyway.

I was thinking that today’s world seemed to be passing me by the other day as I sat, parked, looking across a field I used to traverse as I walked home from high school. The diagonal path I favored, when I didn’t veer off into the woods for a bit of shade, wasn’t marked or paved. I just followed where my feet led me.

All these decades later, though, have changed the character of the field, which is now encircled by a concrete walkway, suitable for joggers, dog walkers and young mothers pushing baby carriages.

No one ever strays from the proscribed route, not that I saw, anyway, so I was tempted to get out of the car and retrace the steps I used to take on those spring afternoons when I pondered whether or not to ask a certain girl to the prom, something I never, ever did.

It was a complicated time, or at least that’s how I remembered it.

Graduation Day, which seemed so far in the future when I started my senior year, was now looming like a shadowy, vaporous wall on the near horizon, and I knew I was going to have to cross through.

I didn’t mind high school all that much, truth be told, though I did my best to affect a moody nonchalance when it came to things like the prom or making the National Honor Society, another blank space on my permanent record, one that ostensibly still trails me.

Eventually, I wandered into college, utterly unprepared for the rigors of serious academic excellence, but even there I stayed off the paved sidewalks that bisected the leafy quadrangles of the campus, preferring to cut across the manicured lawns on my way from one Gothic building to another, ignoring the not-so-subtle wires strung everywhere, meant to discourage such willful walking.

Back home for that summer after my first year, I took a job at the college in my hometown, and ironically enough, part of my responsibilities when mowing the grass or weeding the flower beds was stopping students from straying from the authorized sidewalks.

This edict, of course, I ignored completely, having learned as a freshman studying the classics the proper definition of hypocrisy.

Many years later, having settled down with a kindhearted woman who would one day agree to become my wife, I had just finished mowing the grass that surrounded the three-story, falling-down, antebellum brick curiosity we called home. Situated on a corner in what could be generously called the poor side of town, it needed all the TLC we could give it, so I took lawn care seriously.

The front porch, like most of the house itself, had seen better days — perhaps during the Woodrow Wilson administration — but I’d come to love its “Addams Family” appeal, what with its sagging floorboards, a doorbell that didn’t work and frequent bat fly-bys.

That evening, after laboring for the customary two hours it took to tame the overgrowth, I sat in a lawn chair, tuned the transistor radio to the oldies station, kicked back and popped open a cold one.

As I appreciated my hard day’s work, taking in the ladder-straight lines I had laid down and the careful edging along the sidewalk out front, some kid on a jacked-up bike veered from the street and, going faster than the speed limit, cut right across my lawn, leaving unsightly tire tracks in what had been an immaculate expanse.

But what right did I have to be angry? Was I going to call the cops? And say what? That some punk had messed with my perfection? That he hadn’t obeyed some societal norm I’d always violated?

As I sat and stewed and sipped, I remembered my first trip to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an immense collection of memorabilia scattered across six floors, a virtual connoisseur’s compendium. At the entrance, rather than a detailed map to follow, there hung a sign.

“Now,” it read in Day-Glo letters 6 feet high, “go get lost.”

I’ve never forgotten that sage advice, any old way you choose it.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where folks seem to follow their own paths to join.