Blog 425 – 10.05.2016

Some of our stories touch our own hearts so much that we love re-telling them over and over again. When I was a boy of about ten years old I was madly in love with a movie actress, Shirley Temple. I had watched all her early movies and thought she was about the sweetest thing on earth. It was quite disheartening to learn that she was already at that time a grown woman. You may smile at that ignorant heartsick boy, I do my self, but as the saying goes, “The heart wants what the heart wants.” I suppose if I am honest with myself I have to admit that every woman I have every loved has been one part my own mother, one part Marilyn Monroe, one part Elizabeth Taylor, and one part Shirley Temple. But at ten it was probably one part my mom and three parts Shirley Temple. That was the year before my libido awoke, before puberty began, and I was still a knight with only the purest and most noble notions of the devotions of love. Lust adds a certain luster and bluster but the ignorance and innocence of my love for Shirley is reason enough that over ten years later when I was in college and read in a magazine article of her breast cancer that I wept.  Then again when many years later she died I wept again. I must confess I wept when Marilyn died, when Elizabeth died, when my first wife Barbara died, and when My mother died. Chances are if I know you and survive you that I will also shed a tear for you.

Real men cry and real men love deeply and ladies especially those of you who are looking for a “One man woman” though I have heard rumors of sightings and even of some on display in captivity they are very rare if not extinct in the wild. That is not to say that a man cannot, if he wishes,  control his urges to some degree. Still I re-quote the saying above with a slight twist, “The heart loves whom the heart loves” This is equally true of the fairer sex. Whoever said sex was ever fair – that which drives us to near madness from our pre-teen years till we die if we are lucky. But I fell in love with Shirley as a little girl before the madness overtook me while I was yet a boy back then I just knew that when Shirley sang, “Good night, my Love. Sleep tight, my Love. God bless you. Nighty night, Sweetheart” that she was singing it just for me.

Shirley was called, “America’s Sweetheart” in the nineteen thirties when my Mom was still a little girl, years before I came to America. It took me even then ten years to find her. A crazy thought just came to me, and yeah I know, you are not surprised. I wonder if my early fascination with time travel began with an early desire to go back so I could be there and watch Shirley grow up. A very good movie Some Where In Time, starring the handsome Christopher Reeves and the beautiful Jane Seymour, deals with a tragic love story where the timing is off between two great lovers.

Today I am of a different mind set. To me genuine love is never really tragic. The act of loving another is so audacious, so sublime, and yes even divine that it defies all the rules of logic or as a love song says, “The rules of logic don’t apply.” They could not sing that if it were not true. Well, maybe they could but I still think it is true, that there is in everyone of us this capacity to love unbounded and unfettered by the notion that we must be loved in return. Real love is more than a bargain and it is the True Pearl Beyond Price. Even my boyhood heart at ten years old knew that and I have never forgotten it nor Shirley Temple for teaching me first that love does not have to be returned and also that it is not bound by space and time. I hope this love letter to Shirley Temple Black bounces off a cloud and touches her heart in whatever galaxy or dimension she is holding court in today. She was a little princess when I first came to know of her and I wonder how many more millions of hearts she must reign over now.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White