Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Man, there's nothing like listening to old CDs to ruin one's childhood. Today, my dad found an old Peter, Paul, and Mary CD I used to listen to all the time when I was seven or eight. My grandma's a big fan of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and she used to play their tapes as I fell asleep when I stayed the night at her house. I was listening to the CD, and it came to a song I remember really liking, "Home is Where the Heart Is." Well, now I realize that, all along, the song was about gay couples, and one of them dying of AIDS. Talk about losing one's innocence! I blurted out, "So that's what this song's really about!" My dad laughed at me all evening.

At least my fears about innocent songs from my childhood like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Puff the Magic Dragon" really being drug references have been alleviated. An Internet website (okay, I know, not that reliable, but it contained quotes from Peter, Paul, and Mary themselves) confirmed that the whole "Puff the Magic Dragon" myth is a hoax, and a book of Beatles lyrics that I have has a quote from Paul McCartney, saying that they never realized the apparent reference to LSD until after the song came out, when people started mentioning it to them. Really, according to Paul (and Annie in I Am Sam), it's about a picture Julian Lennon drew of his friend Lucy Connor. I was momentarily worried when Stephanie told me about the LSD thing freshman year, when we studied Lucy (that skeleton) in world history. Not that drugs weren't a big part of what the sixties were about, but it's not nice to have once-innocent moments exposed as having rather sinister underlying messages. As I discovered today.