The saddest words - It might have been

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“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

the saddest are these, It might have been.”

 

 

John Greenleaf Whittier wrote these powerful words in his poem,  "Maud Mueller," published in Pamphlet in 1856.  An American poet and Quaker who fiercely opposed slavery, he was strongly influenced by my favorite Scottish poet Robert Burns.

It was 158 years ago when Whittier wrote those immortal words.  Just seven years later the Emancipation Proclamation, a presidential proclamation, was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 freeing all slaves in America.

On April 9, 1865 General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant formally ending the Civil War and abolishing slavery forever, and just six years later the greatest president in our history was assassinated after leading our nation through it's darkest hours.

 

Destiny?  Certainly Lincoln had premonitions of his upcoming death.  If George Washington was the Father of America then Abraham Lincoln was most certainly the Soul of America sent to the promised land in our hour of most need.  In the end he gave everything including his life to save a struggling nation and make it a beacon to the rest of the world with a Constitution guaranteeing individual freedom and equal opportunity.

 

Robert Burns inspired other people besides Whittier.  Burns lived during the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions and greatly admired those people who would challenge the powerful monarchies that controlled them.  A prolific poet and lyricist,  his poem and song "Auld Lang Syne" is sung throughout the world as New Year dawns.  Born January 25, 1759 he died July 21, 1796 when he was just 37 years old.

 

American novelist John Steinbeck used Burn's works for the title of his 1937 novel "Of Mice and Men."  When asked for the source of his greatest creative inspiration, singer and songwriter Bob Dylan selected Burn's 1794 song "A Red, Red Rose" as the lyric that had the biggest effect on his life.  Author J. D. Salinger borrowed from Burn's poem "Comin' Through the Rye" for his 1951 novel "The Catcher in the Rye."

 

Even I was drawn to Burns and his wonderful talent when I discovered that a distant Scottish relative,  Mary Campbell, was one of his first loves and the subject of several early poems.  Their relationship was the subject of much conjecture and it has been suggested that on May 14, 1786 they exchanged Bibles and "plighted their troth over the Water of Fail" in a traditional Scottish wedding.

 

In August of the same year she was caring for her brother who had typhus and caught the disease herself eventually dying at the age of 23 in Campbeltown, Scotland, an ancient town founded by my ancestors of the Campbell clan.

 

At any rate, while the historical perspective is interesting it is the poignant, melancholy and sentimental words of Whittier one should ponder.  What do they mean in your life?  Are they your final testament because you did not have the courage to follow your heart instead of your mind?  Or can you still escape from the sadness of knowing something might have been?

 

Perhaps you never had a choice in the matter.  Over and over in my life things happened, not of my making or doing, that radically altered my life, shattered my dreams or broke my heart.  Some were my fault or choice, others were when I was a victim of the cruel hand of fate.

 

Some were big and others were small yet they all were definitive lessons that I really wished I didn't have to learn.  Don't get me wrong or feel sorry for me, they were my path, not yours, and I am certain there was some kind of mystical or spiritual reason for the experience.

 

I remember once I spent years with a childhood friend and classmate before I realized  his older sister was my soul mate.  It was something I never expected.  She was the most beautiful girl I ever knew and I was always amazed at how the older boys were lined up to take her out.  She was also very smart, talented and worked hard to hide her many attributes.

 

For some reason, perhaps my lack of discretion or desire to talk to everyone, or the fact I never beat around the bush but always was frank, honest and kept conversations in total confidence, she always treated me like a confidant in spite of a couple of year's age difference.  It seemed I was always far more comfortable with older and more mature people.

 

 

Over the years I became her sounding board about boys, life, the world and whatever else she wanted to discuss.  When her family moved to the next state I would visit her brother several times a year and spend time talking to her when I was in town.

 

After about 12 years of knowing her, when I was a junior in high school, things suddenly changed when I drove to her home.  Bear in mind that in spite of my maturity I was always in awe of her and being her friend was about the best thing I ever did.  But I was also no fool so I was aware my chances of ever being intimate with her, or her wanting to go out with me, were about the same as dating Audrey Hepburn or Natalie Wood.

 

On this particular visit I noticed she seemed really sad and when she went out for a walk behind her house I followed to find out the problem.  By the time I caught up with her she was sitting on a fallen tree trunk and I sat down beside her.  No person that nice and beautiful deserved to be sad so I started singing the Elvis song "Are you lonesome tonight" and to my absolute surprise she started laughing.

 

I asked her if I was that bad and she said I wasn't, but it was just what she needed to stop feeling sorry for herself.  So we talked.  For hours it seemed.  She told me about all the creeps who wanted to date her for a trophy, how insincere they were and how she wished people could just be honest and respectful, like me.

 

Finally she asked what I thought of her, really thought of her.  I admitted it would be impossible to give her any objective assessment because I had been madly in love with her since I was in 1st grade.  After she stopped laughing it took me about 20 minutes to convince her I really was hopelessly in love with her.

 

As she pondered on my dilemma she acknowledged I was the only person she could discuss anything with and never worry about being judged, she trusted me to keep her secrets, and that I always had something intelligent or funny to make her feel better.  Why was it so easy to talk to me she wondered?  And why did I care enough about her to try and help her if she was feeling bad or make her laugh when she was sad?

 

Eventually she concluded I really did care for her.  What she wanted most was to find someone who treated her like I did.  By this point I was praying to God to let her kiss me on the cheek or something in appreciation.  Then she said why do I need to find someone like you when I already know you?

 

That dangling modifier left me dangling and speechless.

 

Over the next year I made several trips to see her brother and her and we spent more and more serious time together.  Hugs grew into kisses and neither of us had any interest in any other person being part of our lives.  Of course we still had college to get through but we agreed to let our parents know how we felt about each other before I went away to college.

 

One day that summer before I left for the University of Arizona she called and said she was going to fly down where I lived in a corporate plane from her father's company so we could tell my parents about us.  Then I would drive her back home so we could tell her parents.  By now we felt so strongly and comfortable about each other that being engaged seemed insignificant.  This was the person I would share my life with.

 

No more would we have to sneak around hiding our relationship.  As I waited at home for her to call and say she landed I was listening to the music of the British invasion on the radio when a news bulletin came on that a corporate plane had crashed a few miles from the airport and there were no survivors.

 

As the weight of the world crashed down on my shoulders I just knew it was her and my heart sank.  She was gone forever.  Our secret would never be revealed.  Our life would never be shared with each other.

 

I was engulfed in a darkness that seemed to suck the life out of me.  I did not know what I did to deserve such a fate and I did not understand why such a beautiful soul had to be taken from this world when she had so much to offer.

 

In the end  I was very angry with God for a long time to come.

 

It was not the first time the line "the saddest words of tongue or pen are these four words it might have been" haunted me and conjured up all kinds of shattered dreams, but this time the line was empowered like never before, and it pierced my heart like no other event in my life.

 

Though I had no choice nor fault nor blame in the tragic event I took it personal and wondered if she was gone because of me.  If I had never pursued our long distance relationship wouldn't she still be alive?  I lost my Earth Angel but in the end I guess I got my Angel in Heaven to help watch over me and I could only hope that the Kingdom she was now in was a far better cry than what we have here.

 

Many years later the passage of time seemed to lessen the anger and allow me to realize that we are all on our own separate paths and though our paths may cross and even run parallel for a time it does not diminish the fact we each have our own Sacred Covenant with Divine Providence and we will depart when our time has come.

 

Rather than harbor bitterness or anger over the loss of a loved one, an act which I came to recognize as somewhat selfish, I became aware of how blessed I was to have spent any time on this Earth in the company of an Angel.

 

As my memory of her shifted from the tragic conclusion of our relationship in the ashes of a plane crash to the wonderful time we did have when we were together, and to the beautiful hopes and dreams we shared of a life together, I think I began to understand the real meaning of love and life.

 

Love is the spiritual bond between two souls allowing them to share both creating and creation in life and of life and it transcends the physical world and human definitions as we discover perfect love together.

 

Whether you call it the Christ consciousness or the conquering of human ego and spiritual dualism, perfect love is accepting co-creator responsibility for all that is, recognizing the life force in all of creation, and giving all of your existence to caring for the gifts of creation we experience in this life and any future existence.

 

Life is the record of our progress in this journey of our soul during this existence, a stepping stone in our Sacred Covenant leading toward our path home.
 

Do not waste your opportunities in life.  Do not embrace "it might have been."

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Obama Follows General McCrystal with Strange Rolling Stone Interview

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Perhaps the commander in chief should have learned the danger of granting interviews to Rolling Stone magazine as it cost the General his job and Obama should know, he fired him. But content in his knowledge that the media is too liberal and too enamored of him and he is in command of all things, he faced the Stone people and made some rather odd comments, even for an Ivy League educated President.

Here are the highlights which should give everyone cause for concern as this is the president of all the people talking. At least Bob Dylan, subject of the last quote, refused to play the political game when Obama invited him to perform at the White House fully expecting a photo op with him. Go Bob!!!

On the Tea Party: “There are strains in the tea party that are troubled by what they saw as a series of instances in which the middle-class and working-class people have been abused or hurt by special interests in Washington, but their anger is misdirected. And then there are probably some aspects of the Tea Party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president. So I think it’s hard to characterize the Tea Party as a whole, and I think it’s still defining itself.”

On Fox News: “The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

On the Democratic Party Mindset: “Some of it, also, has to do with — and I joke about it — that there’s a turn of mind among Democrats and progressives where a lot of times we see the glass as half-empty. It’s like, ‘Well, gosh, we’ve got this historic health care legislation that we’ve been trying to pass for 100 years, but it didn’t have every bell and whistle that we wanted right now, so let’s focus on what we didn’t get instead of what we got.”

On Firing Gen. McChrystal: “…it pained me to have to make the decision I did. Having said that, he showed bad judgment. When I put somebody in charge of the lives of 100,000 young men and women in a very hazardous situation, they’ve got to conduct themselves at the highest standards, and he didn’t meet those standards.”

On Bob Dylan Playing the White House: “Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played “The Times They Are A-Changin.” A beautiful rendition.”

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Bob Dylan Releases Traditional (Almost) Christmas Album

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I thought I entered the Twlight Zone the other day when I heard the first cut from the new and first Bob Dylan Christmas album. I grew up in the state next to where Dylan came from, in Iowa, and he became quite the legend for a lot of reasons. But traditional Christmas was not one of them.



It's true he drifted in and out of his Jewish faith and even got into Christianity at one point, including performing before Pope John Paul II. But Dylan is Dylan and one never knew what to expect next. When you hear him singing Latin on this album you will simply not believe it.



Typical Dylan, every cent in royalty goes to feeding the homeless of the world. So for Dylan fans and those who whould be Dylan fans, I have included an interesting review of the album and two music videos of the songs. If you double click on the music videos it will enlarge the video. You may not believe your eyes and ears.



Bob Dylan: Christmas in the Heart

Bob Dylan and carols is a cocktail that really shouldn't work – especially not in Latin. But Richard Williams finds himself seduced by a punk-Dickensian Santa

Richard Williams
Guardian.co.uk
Thursday 10 December 2009 15.08 GMT

Quirky or turkey? ... Dylan's first Christmas album represents yet another erratic departure



There used to be a civilised convention among reviewers – perhaps there still is, in some sectors of the arts – that performances given for the benefit of charity were exempt from the normal process of criticism. They could be reported, and admired when appropriate, but not dissected or evaluated in the usual way. Since the proceeds from the sales of Bob Dylan's Christmas album will be devoted to feeding homeless people in every territory in which it is released, the critic is clearly not entitled to consider beginning his review with the celebrated single-line exclamation employed by Greil Marcus to open his Rolling Stone review of Dylan's Self Portrait back in 1970: "What is this shit?"



A similar reaction might be the normal, unthinking reponse to the news that the author of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll has chosen to offer for public enjoyment his versions of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, The First Noel, O Little Town of Bethlehem and Adeste Fideles/O Come, All Ye Faithful, its first verse sung in Latin, with characteristic inflections: "Ven-EE-tay ador-ay-MOOSE." Yet here they are, along with their secular equivalents such as The Little Drummer Boy, Winter Wonderland and Mel Torme's The Christmas Song ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire/ Jack Frost nipping at your nose …"), in arrangements calculated not to disturb the seasonal family gathering.

Getting on for half a century ago, no one painstakingly learning the chords to the young troubadour's anti-establishment broadsides could have imagined such an outcome. But ever since the abrupt move back to a simpler method of musical presentation with John Wesley Harding in 1968, Dylan's erratic progress has invited his listeners to poke away behind the surfaces of his apparently enigmatic behaviour. Perhaps the clue here is that "Jack Frost" has been the alias used in the production credits of his studio albums for the past dozen years, since Time Out of Mind. Or perhaps not. This time, perhaps enigmas and clues are beside the point.


Using his own excellent band and a group of singers whose mellifluous responses to his own rheumy growl hark back to the sounds of the Andrews Sisters, Dylan finds an appropriate setting for each of these Christmas chestnuts, from the reverent to the jovial. The blend of idioms is familiar from Love and Theft and Modern Times, in which he brought together elements of country, bluegrass and a sort of genteel salon music to provide a background to his renewed fondness for old-fashioned crooning.


The result is polished without being glib, and a sympathetic listener may find it addictive. The musicians Dylan brought to Britain earlier this year, augmented by David Hildalgo of Los Lobos on accordion, mandolin, violin and guitar, and the great Chicago session guitarist Phil Upchurch, whose earliest successes predate Dylan's own, distinguish themselves on even the most unpromising material. According to Hildalgo, quoted in the current issue of Uncut magazine, the sessions were both impromptu and highly concentrated: Dylan and the musicians listened to various recordings of each of the selections, and then decided on the best approach. It seems safe to say, however, that no one has ever tackled O Come All Ye Faithful quite like this.

Is he sincere? Does he mean it? Is this an ageing entertainer's Christmas gift to his grandchildren, or he is winding us up, knowing that at some time in the future he will repudiate it, as he did Self Portrait? When he sings with a perfectly straight face about the nativity ("Where meek souls will receive him/ Still the dear Christ enters in," for example), is it the product of a resurgence of his interest in Christianity, or simply intended to reflect a generic sense of holidaytime goodwill? You can only chuckle at his ability to keep us guessing when you turn past the conventional cover painting of a horse-drawn carriage speeding through snowdrifts to find a photograph of Bettie Page, the famous cheesecake model, dressed up in a Santa outfit complete with suspenders and bulging bra.



Sceptics should go to YouTube and watch the Must Be Santa video clip. This rollicking song, featuring a rattled-out list of US presidents, is set to a high-kicking shuffle rhythm, decorated by Hidalgo's exuberant Tex-Mex accordion, and delivered by Dylan as a sort of punk-Dickensian Father Christmas from amid the incipient mayhem of a slightly out-of-hand Christmas Eve party. More fun than Renaldo and Clara, for sure.

This is his Christmas, and he seems to want us to enjoy it. But when the grandchildren have left and the decorations have come down in the Dylan household, perhaps he can be persuaded to take a well-deserved break from recording and get on with the really important job of finishing Chronicles Vol 2.

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