Blog 3473 – 02.09.2026
“All I Have To Do Is Dream”
On this day seventy-six years ago in a Justice of the Peace office in Rossville, Georgia a young couple, Alene Davidson and James White vowed “till death do us part” and kept that vow for forty-seven years till James died in the summer of 1997. I have often referred to their marriage as “holy deadlock” not holy wedlock for they seemed to agree on so little and argued about most everything.
As a boy I did not think my dad did enough to try to make and keep my mama happy. After three failed marriages and this forth and final one that will mark thirty-seven years if my wife and I both live till August tenth, I have come to believe that the only person we can make happy is ourself. Not only that, but I think that trying to lay the blame or burden of our own happiness on someone else is a terrible and crushing burden that is all but impossible to bear.
Did my mom and dad love one another? I believe that they actually did. Were they kind and respectful of one another always? I do not think so. Mom resented dad for not trying harder to be the man that she read about in all her romance novels. As for dad, being reminded daily that he was not “the man of her dreams” though she was I think the woman of his, I think must have disappointed him terribly and made him less inclined to be on his best behavior.
The cause of my dad’s death was determined by his doctor to be a heart attack or stroke for he had a heart condition and had suffered a stroke previously. My mom died three years later, the cause of which was obviously the thirty-eight bullet in her brain that she put there by her own hand. She had blamed my dad for her unhappiness for forty-seven years and for the last three years of her life blamed him for leaving her. She suffered through those final years with chronic insomnia and depression. Mom, as long as I had known her, was a cup half empty person, but for those last three years she was a somebody stole my cup person without dad. I think she finally realized it was she not he who was responsible for her own happiness. Still, after almost sixty-nine years, that go round, thinking that someone else was responsible for her unhappiness was a mindset that she was unwilling and unable to change, so she shot herself to end her very unhappy nightmare.
I have often expressed my belief, my opinion, in these blogs, that like the Row, Row, Your Boat song says, “Life is but a dream.” I further think our higher power, our loving an infinite source, our higher and best self, allows us to experience as many of these lives, these dreams, as we wish, and that he/she is experiencing each and all of them along with us. Our own thoughts, words, and deeds produce these plays that take place in a safe space, this construct, that we refer to as time and space. Many dreams seem more like nightmares than sweet dreams.
For all their arguments and personal disappointments my mother and father did I think love one another and me and my brother. They used to tuck us in at night saying, “Sweet dreams.”That is what every loving parent’s wishes for their children and what our heavenly parent wants most for us. Our Creator allows us to create, to write, to choose the cast and location, to produce and to star in each of these personal passion plays. Our higher best self hopes that we will choose that “happily ever ending” eventually, but knows that overcoming trauma, experiencing drama, mystery, suspense, struggle, and plot twists can make a happy ending all that more encouraging and fulfilling.
Even as every play on and off Broadway is not a wonderful experience and raging success often these lives are not what we hoped or envisioned that they would be. I like to think that after each life/dream/play ends or closes there is a cast party where all the scenes, lines, and plot devices are reviewed to determine what worked for us and what did not so we can improve the next dream making it less a nightmare and more a sweet dream with an ever happier ending. I hope mom and dad are having a sweeter dream. And that is my wish, my prayer, my heartfelt intention for the Universe, myself and everyone everywhere – Sweet Dreams!
Your friend and fellow traveler,
(The poet, the dreamer, and me)
David James White
Everly Brothers-All I Have To Do Is Dream (Live) HQ
theencouragingword 