Blog 3348 – 01.02.2025
Blog 3348 – 01.02.2025
Places and Faces I Remember
One of my favorite early Beatles songs, In My Life, has the haunting lines:
It is a subject that I have written about in times past, the haunting memory of the loved and lost.
Barry Manilow in one of his first big hits, Mandy, examines this same theme:
Fifty-five years ago today, six days before I boarded a plane for San Francisco to report to Oakland Army Depot for processing for a year long assignment to the Republic of South Vietnam, I married my girlfriend at the time, Barbara Ann Barefield. She was seventeen and I was nineteen and the odds were against us and the odds won out. She found another and poof she was gone, but not from my heart nor my memory. On Halloween 1999, she died leaving a husband and a teenager daughter and son. I remember Barbara every year on her birthday, on Halloween, and especially today. I think of her often and wonder if I had loved her a little less selfishly, if I had tried a little harder to put her happiness ahead of my own, if we could have made it together. We did not and I have had other relationships, as most of us have, that failed some ending badly as well.
I am so glad and grateful for my lovely and loving wife Linda Lee who has stuck with me for thirty-five years and counting. She, too, had other loves before me that did not last. I am the beneficiary of her lessons learned as she is mine. Some of us who may have thought at the time that we were “unlucky in love” have nevertheless learned from our failures how to be more attentive to the happiness of our beloved in all the little things. Another of the great loves of my life once told me while we were together that I would not have to tell her if I ever stopped loving her because she would know because I would stop doing the little things that say “I love you” so much better than words alone can say.
The best use of memory is to remember all the lessons that life has taught us, or tried to, about loving others better than we love ourselves, thinking more of others and a little less of ourselves.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White
theencouragingword 