Blog 2549 – 10.21.2022

Sharing Your Special Gift, Patiently & Persistently

I believe that everyone has something to contribute, some talent, some special skill. Finding out just what that is and the best way to share it takes a lifetime for most, perhaps several. Sir Elton John, in one of his first big hits, This Is Your Song, sings, “My gift is my song, this one’s for you.”

I have more than once been advised after singing or sharing a few words of my own in print, “Not to quit my day job.” I waited till just after my seventy-first birthday last year to finally quit my day job, intending to see the world with my wife and write of our adventures together. Fate it seems had other plans. After one road trip, in January last, my wife had a terrible bout with Shingles and a psychic break after that. Now she no longer has the wanderlust, but is content just to stay close to home and therefore my new job is chief cook and laundry washer. (My best talent it seems is that I can iron a mean blouse.) Our adventures are of a kind I never had in mind.

The Notebook, one of Nicholas Sparks’s first books and movies, has long been a favorite of my wife’s as it is for many women. I have enjoyed watching it many times, but it is a heartbreaking story on many levels. The wedding vow, “In sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, till death do us part,” is a pretty serious commitment. For most of the last ten years that I lived and worked on the road my wife was more committed to our marriage than I was. She proved to me time and again, traveling all over the country just to see and be with me, how committed she was. When my mom first met Linda, thirty-three years ago, she took me aside and said to me, “David, that woman is never going to let you go.” I long thought that was some kind of mother’s warning, but now I see it was just a loving mother seeing the kind of love in Linda’s heart that she had for me, her first born son, and for my brother Robert too, the “No matter what” kind.

Linda is no longer able to always put into words what makes her cry and she cries a lot more often than she used to. I just hug her and say, “Don’t worry, Baby, everything will turn out alright.” That is some sage advice from an old Beach Boys song that always sounded more like from God’s mouth to our ears to me.

I have loved another song since I first heard it as a young man many years ago. Lancelot could not keep his promise to his Jenny, but Forest Gump did to his, and my darling Linda I intend to keep this promise to you.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bbv-2M7_nUKAn-NeXIzCHgcHMBTaOBi2/view?usp=drivesdk

If Ever I Would Leave You