Blog 3088 – 04.14.2024

Old Flame

A dear friend that I met in Middle School over sixty years ago knew that I never got over the first girl I ever kissed, Rebekah Sue Brogdon. We were both fourteen at the time. Becky was in my homeroom class in ninth grade at East Lake Junior High School. My good friend Phyllis Green let my cry on her shoulder when Becky dumped me for a high school senior at Chattanooga High School where all three of us had planned to attend in the fall. Becky and Phyllis went to City, but I decided at the last minute to go the Central High instead. I just could not see myself standing at the bus stop with Becky and her sister Elaine every weekday morning nor seeing her with her Raymond at City High five days a week.

Phyllis used to tease me that the George Jones song, He Stoped Loving Her Today, would apply to me too. Last August just a few days before her birthday, Becky passed. There is still an old flame burning in my heart for her. I don’t think anyone ever truly gets over their first love or their first heartbreak, or perhaps any of the others either. Two years after Becky met her Raymond. I wrote a little poem for her in study hall at my high school which was across town from hers. It was published in the Teen Tempo section of the Chattanooga Post, a short lived daily newspaper, and later in a book of poetry called the Cloverleaf Collection. I published it here again as a tribute to Becky and all loves, first and last.

If One Loved

If one was loved

Could he not see,

Would he not know

If loved he be?

Should he not cry

The tears if feels?

Alone, if wished,

But if he wills?

And could he say

If she would hear

That ‘‘twas for her

His every tear?

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xqRa4MFXyQPfNO10xAXvB3F1KfT_lH-o/view?usp=drivesdk

Old Flame