Blog 3557 – 07.31.2025

Fame

When I was a teenager I was very fond of a pretty blonde girl two years my junior and the niece of my pastor’s wife. The only time I ever got to see Barbara other than church or Sunday School was when she was baby sitting her aunt and uncle’s three children Greg, Joy, and Kimberly and later baby Stephen. I also grew so fond of the Pentz children that I would come to play with them even when Barbara was not there. Probably the biggest reason that I began dreaming of having children of my own was that I fell in love with not just Barbara but her two nieces and two nephews.

Years later when I first read C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I saw that he dedicated the then considered first book in the series, The the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, to is goddaughter, Lucy Pevensie. Lucy was the daughter of Lewis’s friend and fellow Oxford scholar, Owen Barfield. My Barbara’s last name was Barefield before she briefly changed it to White in January 1970 before I left for an eleven months tour in South Vietnam. Our marriage was over before it was really begun for while I was gone she met another and “poof she was gone.” I wrote Barbara a letter every day during those eleven months that I was in Vietnam. On the outside of the envelop of each of those love letters I wrote P.F.O.B., which stood for Pray For Our Baby. I never got to have a baby with Barbara nor even a Dear John letter from her, instead she just quit writing to me about six months after I got there. I guess she did not have the courage to tell me that she had found somebody else. As unkind as a Dear John letter might have been, four months of not knowing for sure was a far unkinder act. Still the Pentz children never stopped loving me. Even Stephen who was a baby and his younger sister Kristi born years later after their dad took another church far from my hometown Chattanooga came to know and love me too through her older brothers and sisters. I met Kristi but once at weekend retreat at our church’s state campground in Middle Tennessee when she was about five. I could tell by the look of love in her eyes that she had heard lots of story about me from her older brother and sisters. It was my first experience of true fame and it felt pretty good.

I drove all the way back to Chattanooga from Houston years later to attend Joy’s wedding and we have maintained contact by phone, emails, and texts over the years. I called Joy a few days ago to ask after her mother whose both eyes and ears have begun to fail her. Elizabeth who prefers to be called Katie as it was her beloved dad and brothers’ pet name for her, has been like another mother to me. And whatever else we may disagree about we have long shared a deep love for her niece Barbara who passed almost twenty-six years ago, her husband John, who also died over ten years ago, and her wonderful children who all are very much alive today.

As I spoke with Joy on the phone I could heard a couple of her children in the background Neil, aged twelve and Caroline, aged eight. As Joy and I shared our mutual love of the Narnia books especially our two favorites The Silver Chair and The Magician Nephew, Joy told me that her children when they saw David on her phone caller I.D. became exited because they knew me. Joy went on to say that she had played many of the children’s book readings that I have recorded to her children. She said that her children had even asked her if I was famous. I told Joy, “To the Pentz children I am.” Neil piped up and asked me I would read and record the Narnia books for him. I said, “Give me your email address and I will begin with the new book one, The Magician’s Nephew, one chapter a day till I have completed them all. I have been wanting to do that so that my granddaughter Emma Grace, who turn’s two next Tuesday, will have them as well as the over two hundred and ninety children’s book recordings that I have made.

You see, I mean to be famous, if not in my lifetime perhaps posthumously. Is not that a big reason why we want to have children so much because we want to leave something behind, we want to live on, to be remembered, to be celebrated, to be famous.

It was the Pentz children who gave me my first taste of fame and continue to. Joy’s last name and her children’s is Jefferys, but she and her husband have given all three of their adopted children “Pentz” for their middle name, I am so glad to have yet another younger generation of Pentz children to love, to read for, and to write to and about.

Your friend, fellow traveler, and fan – the ever famous,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vMeLMcbpUSD9S5BlFwxWe4vDgx3wDiDp/view?usp=drivesdk

To Leave Something Behind