I was a closet Beatles freak until about the time "Rubber Soul" was released.  

Being a 14-year-old putz wasn't easy for someone who'd never planned on being one, but hormones and an unsuspected blast of teenage lonlieness provided lessons I was quick to learn. I was the Sneering One. The Smart-Ass. The Hypocrite who mocked his younger sister Karen's love of The Beatles while stealing time at night to listen to her albums, lying on the living room floor, his head between the twin speakers of his parents' stereo, playing "Beatles '65" at a barely audible level, fearful he'd be discovered -- yeah, hiding his love away -- eager to get lost in the bouyant, simple songs of lost love, threatened romance, and most of all the simple sonic joy that two electric guitars, an electric bass and a drum kit can bring a kid who finds himself alone in a world that seems stacked against him, that wants to keep him confused, resentful  and fearful.

But I was a putz and The Beatles were a girl band and no self-respecting he-manly teenager could admit his love of The Fab Four. Even, in the beginning, to himself. Real manly teenagers dug The Stones. 

I had reason to remember those teenage days while lying in a hospital bed two months ago, recovering from abdominal surgery and beginning to feel the tendrils of depression reaching out for a body slapped by circumstance as unexpected as adolescence into a dismal room, with a second-floor view of a scrawny treetop to my right and to my left a TV screen controlled by a fellow sufferer who took some inexplicable pleasure in viewing the Food Network all day.

Food -- real, chewable  food -- was what I craved and it was what I was denied those first four days of my confinement. Every day I asked for it, knowing full well that when it arrived it would be a noxious farago of over-cooked vegetables, meat roll smothered in dead-white gravy and a square of glutinous "dessert" that would be as edible as a sponge. I wanted "real" hospital food only because its granting would signal my imminent departure from the hospital. With each passing day, it loomed in my imagination like the whale in Ahab's mind.

My nutritional needs were being met those first four days by a large plastic bag that hung over my left shoulder to which was attached a plastic tube through which coursed so much dextrose, among many other taste-free chemical nutrients, that I was regularly given insulin shots to counteract its  effects. Watching Rachel Ray gad about her TV kitchen, whipping up a skillet full of sizzling sausage and peppers while babbling about her busy day was about all I could take, come the fourth day of my confinement.The tendrils were taking root.

On that day, I received not the bagel-and-cream-cheese of my dreams but something better: my daughter's laptop computer, which the hospital building itself did its best to defeat: there were only so many electrical outlets available in my space-capsule-size  room, and most of them were plugged into some part of me.  But Annie's laptop had a wi-fi card. Miraculously, the hospital actually provided wi-fi. Flawless wi-fi. Wi-fi that did what the hospital's menu couldn't do: provide blessed nurture for one of its ailing occupants.

It was there, on an otherwise sodden July afternoon, that I re-connected with my closeted past. In place of those big gray stereo speakers, a pair of tiny white ear buds. In place of my sister's platters, YouTube. For secretive volume, substitute full-blast sound.

At YouTube, I typed in "beatles hard day's night." I played it, listened, watched it -- the opening clip of the Richard Lester movie. I felt like I was watching history being made -- my own, and the world that was given birth with that bizarre opening chord -- "SPLANG! --  and the sight of four young men in suits and ties being pursued by a mob of girls.

Lying there, I took notes, in a shaky hand, not caring if it added up. But I couldn't stop making sense despite myself:

" The four of them in deep focus running toward the camera. George is down! He's up. They're all grinning. It's a game and they're running, running, running in their buttoned-down-and-tied-up suits, racing through a black-and-white world of hand-held movie motion, always a step ahead of a screaming horde of girls."

I played the clip more than once that day. Whenever I did, my hospital cell melted away. I was my old, skinny, secretive self again, lying on the living room floor but no longer constrained by my ideas and fears. 

I was being fed, then as now.  That opening chord was the moment everything changed for me. Here's what I wrote when I was finally ready to put the computer away, when I'd finally and for the first time during that miserable stay become satiated:

"Here I am nearly half a century later, tears in my eyes, resembling no one in the movie more than Paul's grandfather, knowing as much as it's possible for me to know how thrilling it must have been to be a lovesick teenage girl back then, screaming her head off for her favorite Beatle, sobbing at the pure mysterious pleasure of the chase she knew she could never win but running just the same, unleashing an innocent passion in an otherwise cold world, a passion  that should never have been sneered at but rather treasured for the tender moment it was and the nourishing food it's since become for me."

To my sister Karen and all those lovely girls like her who threw their love to their smiling idols, however briefly, innocently or hopelessly, please accept the apologies of a a once-callow young man who didn't -- couldn't -- see you for the angels you were.