Love is broad and timeless and it may fade, but moments can bring back into focus time, place and people from days gone by.
A DOVE COOED in the distance this morning as I sat out on the patio, next to Buddha. Next thing I knew I was decades back in time, driving up through Fort Ancient in Southern Ohio toward Route 22 and then on into my hometown of Wilmington, Ohio.
I don’t remember the year, or the morning, but I was going home for some reason, by myself. My parents were still in their home; everyone I cared about was alive and safe and I would be seeing them all soon.
Then, a song came on the radio. It was by design. I had a Bob Wills cassette tape in the player. But when this song came on, after the first verse I pulled over to the side of the road and cried. I didn’t know why at the time. But later I looked at the lyrics, played it again and realized love is not just for a person or place and when if fades you want desperately to bring it back.
As I look at the letters that you wrote to me
It’s you that I am thinking of
As I read the lines that to me were so sweet
I remember our faded love
[Chorus]
I miss you, darling, more and more every day
As Heaven would miss the stars above
With every heartbeat I still think of you
And remember our faded love
[Verse 2]
I think of the past and all the pleasures we had
As I watch the mating of the dove
It was in the springtime that you said goodbye
I remember our faded love
[Chorus]
I miss you, darling, more and more every day
As Heaven would miss the stars above
With every heartbeat I still think of you
And remember our faded love
Where I grew up the corn and soybean fields give way to the beginning of the Appalachian foothills as the land slopes to the Ohio River. In that part of the county country music could be heard in the bars and I can recall Bluegrass jam sessions. But when I was young I wanted nothing to do with it.
The British rockers had invaded. Elvis still ruled. No teen-age boy would ever go up to a girl and ask “you wanna go hear some Bluegrass?” One time I did sneak off to Lakeside Bar and listen to our local country western group, Earl Baker and Cowan Creek Boys. I couldn’t get in but if you stood outside along the wall where the stage was, the sound came through.
THAT ASIDE, I was pretty ignorant about country music, be it Bluegrass, Swing, Hillbilly Rock, until I moved to Texas. I was introduced to Bob Wills at some point and the song the drew me in was “Faded Love” with its mournful fiddle intro.
We lived in Arlington, Texas at the time and Bob Wills, long-dead, still was a big draw in Fort Worth’s Stockyards. There was a museum and members of his old band, The Texas Playboys, would have reunions in one of the bars. The last one was a farewell performance by his pianist, Charlie Strickland, who die a year or so after that farewell. His daughter was the women’s volleyball coach at the University of Texas at Arlington and we knew her. She invited us. It was a wonderful Sunday afternoon with beer, Charlie and some sidemen sitting in with him.
One year, wandering West Texas, we stopped in Turkey, Texas where Wills lived and where there is a Bob Wills Festival.
I guess you could say I got hooked on Wills and the hook remains set.
When the dove began to coo this morning, the song came into my head along with the coo. I didn’t get as misty as I did that morning, but with my wife slowly going away in a memory care center, held captive by dementia, and me living alone in a one-bedroom apartment trying to fight off the effects of being an old geezer, there was bit of the mist.
When I got to my parents’ home that morning decades ago, I arrived with a new definition of love born of that roadside stop that included times and places that I took for granted, not thinking of a time when they would be gone. My parents were young then that I am now, and I was not thinking of their deaths. We were all still immortal.
Just as love fades it all can come back in a moment, brought to life in a song, a look, a kiss, a memory.
Thanks, Bob.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=uUw7lzPAea4
Rich Heiland is a retired journalist and semi-retired consultant, trainer and public speaker. During his journalism career he was a reporter, editor, publisher, college instructor, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and a National Newspaper Association Columnist of the Year honoree. He also writes the intodementia.com blog about his family’s experience with dementia. He lives in West Chester, PA and can be reached at [email protected].