Blog 2986 – 01.02.2023

Beauty And The Beast

Fifty four years ago, home on leave before being deployed to South Vietnam, I talked my girlfriend into getting married. The marriage did not survive my almost year long overseas assignment. Four months before I returned her letters stopped coming. She was a beauty, but it was a beastly thing she did at the time.

Admit it or not we are all capable of beastly acts. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is not so strange at all really. We all have a tendency to make ourselves the hero of our own story and to deny that we are as often the villain as well.

I convinced that little girl to marry me because I was afraid I would lose her to someone else if I went away for a year leaving her to wait for me. I lost her anyway. It was a beastly thing I did, setting her up to fail. Had we waited till I got back to marry perhaps the relationship might have survived, maybe not. We will never know.

It is as the song says “a tale as old as time.” Another of the songs I sing, Broken Vow by Josh Groban, says:

My first little ex-wife remarried later and had two lovely children. She died when she was forty-seven, twenty-five years ago this coming October. I saw her a couple of years before she passed at my father’s wake. I marveled that she looked to me the same as she had on that January day in 1970. Years later I saw pictures of her taken about the same time as I had seen her. She had changed the camera testified, but in my heart and mind she always remains the beauty in our beauty and the beast story. So I indeed found a way to keep somehow more than a broken vow.

Your friend and fellow traveler

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-yZYl–Su8vK9MjM9ZbY23V7do3Y6MXT/view?usp=drivesdk

Beauty And The Beast