When I was 14 my mother invited a rock star to our house, without telling me. When he showed up unannounced and proposed marriage, I went into shock. Like any normal girl would.
It was 1965.
In our living room at the time stood my grandfather's clock. The pendulum was working back then - it was ticking calmly, unlike my teenage heart. Shy young Mick paused to examine it - he always liked antiques.
Down in the basement where we went to speak in private, he groped for the ring in his pocket.
"I've come to ask for your hand in marriage."
What would you do? I gaped. Then my open mouth uttered a stream of garbled phrases that sounded insulting to my first suitor. I had a horrible, gagging meltdown and ended up getting a memory wipe courtesy of the psychiatrists who controlled our family.
My mother's plans for the future crumbled to dust on that day. My life went off the rails from that moment on.
I only found out about all this when I was 68 and my mother had been dead for 40 years. She carefully hid the truth from me and erased this tragic chapter of my early teens. The brain doctors did the rest.
Now I see that from at least 1962 on, she had been scheming against my father's wishes to marry me off to the lead singer of a future rock and roll band called the Rolling Stones.
The Tavistock psychiatrists in the background approved of the plan -- until I scuttled it by screaming inappropriately and becoming catatonic.
And the rest is only rock and roll.