Life Reviews
This seems to be the season, that time of year for looking back, thinking of the people we once loved who are no longer part of our lives, either through choice or by death. It's a time we look at decisions we've made, ponder what might have happened had we taken the other path. Some people see this looking back as a bad thing. They label it 'morose' or 'dwelling on the past'. I see it as a good thing. I see it as a time when my heart and mind are filled with the faces of my family, friends long gone, places I've lived...traveled through. Sometimes I play a game with myself. I imagine, had I gone another way...stayed at a time when I left a situation...would I have been happier? When I weigh it all out, I realize I'm exactly where I needed to be and wanted to be. My life now is the result of those thousands, no millions, of minute decisions I've made along the way.
I picked the music for this page for a reason. While still in my twenties, the man I fell in love with at the end of graduate school had already signed up for OCS to be stationed on a ship out of Pearl Harbor to Nam afterwards. I had signed a job contract for University teaching in St Louis. It was to be 14 months before we saw each other again--IF we saw each other again--and married. Over the summer we dated, A Whiter Shade of Pale played repeatedly on the radio until our love and this song became indelibly intertwined. The summer's end was heartrending. Would he be stationed on a destroyer? On one of those tiny boats that went up the wild dangerous rivers behind the DMZ?
One spring weekend, six months after our parting, I stopped at a mall to get a few clothes for work. While parking the car, A Whiter Shade of Pale came onto the radio. It was no longer a big hit and I hadn't heard it since summer. I didn't move...I just sat in the car, radio blaring, spring's sunlight beaming through the window, and suddenly I was carried back...back in time to when we loved and we dreamed. For those few moments I was with him again.
We married. It lasted almost six years. Who knows why these things go so wrong? Although relatively safe on a supply ship this side of the DMZ, no-one escapes Viet Nam. He had tasted the horror of war. His ship had been shelled, two men killed. He'd heard the stories...the killings, the men who went into the jungles and never came back. His brother was in the center of one of those jungles. Back in St Louis, I fought a different sort of hell. My closest friend had committed suicide and I was struggling to cope with his loss and the possible loss of the man I loved.
We had both changed and neither of us could be there for the other as it happened. Over time, we drew further and further apart. I still don't believe our marriage ended because we loved any less. We had only lost our ability to show and share it.
I do know that when I hear this song you're hearing now, I'm in my twenties again, waiting for the day I would move to Hawaii, find work, and wait for the USS Genesee to steam down that long channel into Pearl Harbor. I'm that eager young woman again, sitting on the brink of a new beginning. I remember those days and I smile. Is it so wrong to remember?
Now we move into 2002. More change. More uncertainty, more homage paid to those from our past, and it's okay. Isn't that the way life really is? Rooted in the present, yet also looking back in wonder, looking forward in anticipation.
12/30/2001
To read more musings, click HERE
Music: A Whiter Shade of Pale
