Blog 3035 – 02.21.2024

Galveston

I identified with the song Galveston the first time I heard it after having returned from South Vietnam and reporting for my last ten month assignment to Fort Liberty, North Carolina (long named after a defeated Confederate General) in February of 1971. I was felling pretty defeated myself after returning to a lovely young woman who no longer wanted to be my wife. The line in the song “Is she waiting there for me?” was particularly tough for I knew the answer too well – No, she was not.

I lived to hunt again as the saying goes and met another lovely young woman not far from Galveston at a college that we were both attending at the time in Houston in 1973. One of our first dates was a trip to the beach in Galveston. Alas, she too figure out the she no longer wanted to be married to me after three and a half years. We had moved back to my home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee after a couple of years of relative wedded bliss in Houston. My new wife was not happy there and longed to return to Texas again or to her own home town of Laurel, Mississippi. Six months after our divorce, her first my second, I returned to Houston. While there that time I met yet another lovely woman with two sons. I returned to Tennessee, but could not get them out of my mind so I returned, married her and together we gave those boys a little sister. We walked the beach at Galveston together as a family. That marriage lasted seven years. That divorce was the most painful and took over a year to be finalized. The boys were almost grown, but my daughter was still a child and I cried every time after our court designated weekends, two week summer vacations, and alternating Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday visits. I recall that during the early part of the divorce negotiations that I was only allowed supervised visits with my daughter so on one of those I took her and her mother to the beach at Galveston. My daughter filled a small pail with shinny little shells that she found on the beach. Those little shells turned out to be baby calms that woke her and her mother screaming in the night. My little girl felt sad and guilty for causing those little creatures to suffer and die. She did not know nor did we that they were meant to stay on the wave tossed beach at Galveston.

After three failed marriages I tried yet again and married another lovely woman that I had met my first year at college in Houston many years prior. She had never married and was particularly attracted to me because I had a little girl and she loved children. Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt was our song and shortly after we were married we had a son. While dating, we walked the beach at Galveston. Our son grew up loving Galveston too and has already strolled the beach with his wife and their baby girl.

A few months ago not long after our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary my last lovely and loving wife and I took a ride to Galveston. We did not walk the beach for it was too cold and windy, but we drove the entire length of the beach and had seafood at a restaurant on the sea wall.

She was it turns waiting for me, not far from Galveston, all those years ago. I am so glad and grateful we finally found one another and have had these wonder years together. I could never have guessed how many trips we would make together to Galveston. The song still moves my heart.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11q0f-DaHG-LxN62-z_3ESB6DuKWZ7Gds/view?usp=drivesdk

Galveston