In a dusty basement, well past bedtime, four Beatles were hard at work perfecting the song “I’m Looking Through You”.

Slumped over a colorful electric drum kit, too close to the TV screen, was a young girl who insistent on playing the part of Ringo Star (No doubt because she was so fond of his name which she kept on repeating). She joyously flailed her arms completely out of sync with the music and looked far more like Animal from the Muppets than Ringo himself. I grabbed her by the collar of the dress she had on backward so I could pull her and her drums back into the room to keep her from smacking a hole in my TV screen. Or worse. It almost seemed as if she wouldn’t have stopped at simply smashing the TV screen and would have kept on rolling straight through the wall if she were given the chance, blasting her way out through the garage like some kind of drum powered freight train.

To my right were Paul and John. Paul was wearing a red dress this evening and swaying back and forth as she sweetly sang the lines of the song. She closed her eyes and crooned like she was a jazz singer on a stage. When she saw me watching she winked and sang, “You don’t look different but you have changed,” with a sort of bow that betrayed her innocence in concerning the words she was saying.

Curled up on the rug next to her was John, singing harmonies. He was holding his microphone sideways in both hands like an ear of corn and he didn’t seem to even be singing the same song as everyone else. Apparently, Yoko had already gotten to him. He was all Art Rock and nonsense now. His version of “harmonies” were to alternate between bird-like shrieking and the mumbled sounds of a little boy rubbing his lips on the end of a microphone. I reached over and turned his microphone the right way and he smiled and nodded a muffled thank you, then immediately turned it sideways again.

I sighed into my plastic guitar. Tonight I was George, the forgotten Beatle. And I felt the part as I thanklessly struggled to pull everyone back from the brink of disaster and tried to make sure we got a decent score in the Rockband game we were playing.

We barely beat our previous high score, but everyone cheered anyway.

It was a moment in time. We were together. Here in this basement, we existed, the four of us, like a puff of smoke hanging frozen in the air. Who knew where we would end up. How long this band would last. What mattered was that we were here now. And this was ours.

Lydia contorted herself like a cat to scratch her back with the end of her drum stick. Clara laughed and spun herself in an office chair and then spent the next two minutes untangling the microphone cable that was now wound around the legs of the chair. Gideon was sprawled out flat on his back, panting up at the ceiling as if he had just finished a marathon and needed to be airlifted out the window.

I made a selection on the screen. “Here,” I said, “This is a new one you’ve never heard before.” Lydia’s sticks went in the air and froze, waiting to pounce. Clara smoothed out her dress and held her microphone daintily in two fingers. Gideon sprang into a fighting stance.

“It’s called ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.” And we charged down the beach and threw ourselves into it like it was an ocean at midnight.