What the Beatles have in common with sandwiches

There are only two things that a person can say that will immediately convince me that he or she is lying:

1) “I don’t like the Beatles.”

2) “I don’t like sandwiches.”

It would be understandable for some people not to like sandwiches if there were only one kind of sandwich. Or only one kind of Beatles song. But the infinite potential of sandwiches and the actualized potential of the Beatles are both so varied and multifarious that it is, I am convinced, simply impossible to categorically dislike one or the other.

And if a person claims to do so, then the poor thing should be properly introduced to baguettes, focaccia, and John Lennon as quickly as possible — or they should stop lying.

My lovely friend Ashley and I had discussed this over lunch, and then we went to the bookstore she promptly overheard the man who worked there shrug nonchalantly, “I just don’t really like the Beatles.”

Obviously, we fled to the stacks, and got distracted by poetry and Chekhov and the universal law that every bookstore must have at least one used copy of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française.

I ended up with A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (which I’d already read), and Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt (which I hadn’t). When I went to pay for them, the clerk (the one we were eavesdropping on earlier) commented, “These are both really good books.”

I was distracted by some plastic alien finger puppets, so I said, “Indeed.”

He held up Eichmann. “Make sure you have something funny on hand when you read this one, though. It’s amazing, but, you know ... super depressing.”

In the movie version of my life, I will say, “I appreciate that, but I can’t take advice from a man who pretends not to like the Beatles. How do you feel about sandwiches?”

But in actual life, of course, I said, “Yeah, will do. Thanks.”