Blog 2472 – 08.01.2022

He Didn’t Notice That The Light Had Changed

Fifty-five years ago the Beatles released their Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. It was the first Beatle album I ever owned. I was sixteen that summer and working as a sack-boy in a grocery story just a couple of blocks from my parents’ home. The new Beatle album had such a wide release that even the grocery store I worked at had a copy for sale on their limited record display. I used my tips that weekend to purchase the album. Over the course of a couple of years I bought all the Beatle albums marketed by Capital Records.

One of the longer songs on that album is the one pictured above. Those haunting lyrics ran through my head again twenty-two years ago when I learned that my mother had just taken her own life with a gun. The first woman I had ever loved was gone in a sudden and tragic way. The year before on Halloween the first woman of the four I married died. Barbara died of a stroke at aged forty-seven. She had remarried and had two children. I last saw her at my father’s funeral two years before she passed. Yesterday my first real girlfriend, Becky, died just two weeks before her seventy-second birthday.

My boyhood gal pal, Phyllis, who loves country music, and who I don’t think ever forgave Becky for breaking my heart at fourteen, said that the George Jones song, He Stopped Loving Her Today, would be true in my case regarding Becky. It is not, but I suspect another truism will ever be, “You never forget your first love.”

The great love and light of my life is my wife of almost thirty-three years, Linda Lee Stokes. But there have been lesser lights that have burned in the night sky for me as there have and are for most of us. I believe if you truly love someone that love lives on like the theme song from the movie, Titanic, and that we are left with more than tickets torn in half, faded photographs, memories in bits and pieces, and even more than broken vows.

So many sad love songs, but one especially appropriate to honor the winking out of a star is my cover song at the end of this blog today. Jesus remarked at the passing of his cousin John The Baptist that “We all rejoiced for a while in his light.” That may be said of all the love-lights that we allow to shine into our lives. We are indeed better off for all that we let in.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S_ysLH4hPufXxXOCAbSc9McY3_O0fqmQ/view?usp=drivesdk

All That We Let In