The Last Time

This is not what I remember because I remember almost nothing. But this is what I can piece together from the available facts, a video, and a dream I had about 10 years ago.

I was 14 years old and living at my parents' house in the suburbs of Montreal. It could have been a Saturday afternoon. My father and brother were not around and my mother was in the kitchen at the sink looking out the window. She said, "There's someone here to see you. Go let him in."

I stopped whatever I was doing and went to open the front door, and there was Mick Jagger. My first impression was that he'd recently had a haircut looked neater than when I'd last seen him, probably months earlier, probably on the T.A.M.I. show which my friends all watched on TV.

I opened the outer screen door and he stepped into the entrance and stood for a moment in the hall next to the living room, looking around. He was 21, very polite and well spoken, just the kind of boy my mother would have appreciated. She said "Why don't you go down in the basement and talk?" We walked past her through the kitchen and down the basement stairs and then we were in this cavernous room which had a ping pong table in the middle, crammed together with an upright piano and a little shelf with a record player.

I leaned against the ping pong table and Mick stood over by the door to the garage, and after a couple of minutes he said "I've come to ask for your hand in marriage." Those words. There was a pause and then something seemed to possess me and I uttered a string of ironic comments that might also have sounded crazy - I'm not sure what I said but my little tirade was just a prelude to what I imagined would turn into a serious discussion. But Mick apparently saw it differently because without a word he left.

In the time it took me to digest this scene and its aftermath and wake from the dream, I was flooded with a 14 year old's emotions. Maybe I cried, or maybe I thought well fuck him if he can't take a joke, or wondered why is he so vain? There was panic about how I would ever recover from this event - which luckily was only a dream and therefore just an artifact of my unconscious to be analyzed and forgotten once I had extracted its true meaning...

It didn't take much analysis to figure out it could not have happened and the proof was 1. I had no conscious memory of Mick coming to my house in 1965, and 2. what would have brought him there and 3. how would he have found it?

It didn't occur to me until this past April to go look up the actual date of the Stones' first concert in Montreal, but when I did find this video I recognized Mick's shy good manners, and the haircut.

In the video we learn that the Stones spent a few days in Montreal, not just at their hotel. We also know, from a 2015 story in the Montreal Gazette that they had wheels - a rental car. Which needed repairs on the afternoon they left for Ottawa.

April 24, 1965

Actually it was a broken mirror (seven years bad luck) that needed replacing and these little kids were there to record the historic moment...