Blog 3679 – 12.01.2025
“December to December”
Fifty-two years ago I was completing my second semester of three years at a very conservative Bible College in Houston, Texas. The rules were quite strict, but not strictly observed by all of the young students. I had met a young woman from Laurel, Mississippi. She was a transfer student from another of our church’s religious colleges in Florida. Her school was perhaps a bit more progressive – she certainly was. She opened my eyes to possibilities beyond the scope of a Bible College curriculum. On weekends when there were no classes one of our favorite extracurricular activities was driving across the big city of Houston to a movie theater. (Watching movies was against the rules. Thought there was a TV Room in the Student Lounge and The Cross and the Switchbade movie starring Pat Boone and Eric Estrada was screened in the Campus Chapel one Saturday evening.) The two movies we watched more than a few times that fall were the then recently released Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford romantic hit movie The Way We Were and a revival presentation of the 1967 musical with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave, Camelot.
Today’s title comes from the Camelot reprise song at the end of the movie. As today is the first day of December, I thought it appropriate. Even when our world seems to be falling apart, as King Arthur’s world was, and we are afraid that all the good the we have tried to accomplish might be forgotten, we need to remember as we lie upon our cot that once there was a fading wisp of glory called Camelot.
The broadway musical Camelot had a long run with notables in the lead including Richard Burton and Robert Goulet. It was a favorite of our young handsome President and his lovely young wife.
Jackie Kennedy shortly after the tragic death of her husband John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963 (my thirteen birthday), fearful like King Arthur was that all the good things that her husband had tried to accomplish might might be forgot, began to weave a myth about his brief Presidency comparing it to Camelot.
My college girl friend and I were wed in her home church in Laurel, Mississippi on June first 1974. She even sang to me, as we made our wedding vows, a song from Camelot, the one Lance sang to Jenny, If Ever I Would Leave You. But Linda Gail like Lance was unable to keep that impossible promise. Our marriage only lasted for a brief moment, three and a half years. All relationships end with one or the other leaving. The promise “till death do us part” is a difficult one to keep and even those fortunate few who can still have the death of their partner to face. Divorce itself is a kind of death, I think, though my Christian conservative friends, many of them, might disagree with me on that point.
Though our marriage ended she never left me for I have carried the memory of watching The Way We Were and Camelot with her all these years. We saw them enough times to memorize all the important lines. Over the years I have watched both movies again several times and listened to the soundtrack of those hauntingly beautiful songs many more times. Barbra sings, “Memories may be beautiful and yet, what’s to painful to remember we simply choose to forget, But it’s the laugher, we will remember whenever we remember the way we were.”
I conclude with King Arthur’s reprise of Camelot – “Each evening from December to December before you fall asleep upon your cot, think back on all that you remember of Camelot…”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Camelot (Reprise), Camelot (1967)
theencouragingword 