Blog 2319 – 02.28.2022

I Will Sing You To Me

In the 2008 epic love story movie, Australia, two star cross lovers played by the lovely Nicole Kidman and the handsome Hugh Jackman find love in circa World War Two Australia. The true star of the movie is neither Kidman nor Jackman, but a young Brandon Walters who plays the handsome and endearing Aboriginal boy Nullah whose mother is killed by his white Australian father and for whom Kidman finds the great mother’s love in her own heart.

My lovely and loving wife Linda and I first saw the movie together in a theater when it first came out and have watched it several times since on cable even purchasing it on DVD so we could watch it anytime we wished. My Linda like Kidman’s character, Lady Sarah has a mother’s heart big as Texas, big as Australia in Sarah’s case, for her boy Jonathan, but also room enough in her heart for her own Rover, me.

Since 2012 when I began what would become over ten years away on the road working, Linda’s love like Nullah’s has always sung me back to her or she to me wherever I was. In December I retired from that traveling job vowing to spend the rest of my days with Linda my one true wife and forever love. But alas, barely a couple of weeks ago Linda suffered some kind of mental break and spent a week in an emergency hospital having tests run and then was transferred to a behavioral hospital for treatment of disassociation, confusion, and paranoia. Due to the behavioral hospital’s COVID restrictions neither I nor any of Linda’s family and friends can visit her. She would probably not recognized any of us at this time.

Yesterday, I tasted briefly a bit of hopeless helpless despair pondering whether my beloved is lost to me for the rest of this adventure in time and space. But, then I remembered Australia and the vow we made to one another before my ten years on the road traveling ever began. We vowed as the little boy in the movie did to his new mom that whatever time or distance in life ever divided us that each of us would sing the other back to us. Linda grew up in a large musical family yet was never the gifted singer that her mom, dad, and brother Paul were. She nevertheless was always humming the tune of some love song that appealed to her heart.

She has for all the years that I have known her said and often, “Sing me a song.” It she who first encouraged me at the only high school reunion I ever attended, my twenty-fifth in 1993, to get up and sing karaoke. The song I picked for her was the Beatles, When I’m Sixty Four, an age we are now both seven years passed. It was largely for her that I recorded my karaoke style covers of over two hundred and fifty love song in the event that I might one day be unable to sing them to her.

Like the young man in the first person to ever come out of the catatonic state story that I shared more than a week ago I believe that music not only has the power to soothe the savage beast, to awaken us, but also to find, and to draw our lost lovers to us. And so I take hope, it is my default mode. Linda, my love, I am singing to you, and believing that you will hear me, come back to me, that we will find each other again and again in yet this lifetime, and throughout countless lifetimes to come.

Your friend and fellow traveler in time and space,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/133ABeQ7YUAuxg2sSdqHJkhQIMNzW_k6S/view?usp=drivesdk

After The Lovin’