IT'S A SEVEN HOUR DRIVE FROM Miami, Florida to Tallahassee, Florida. It is a long peninsular state and, these days, the available highways are high-speed, divided, long distance bores with minimum reasons to slow down except for rest stops or gas stations. Of all the states that I have traveled through, Florida may be the most boring, as its highest point is only a couple of hundred feet above sea level. As for the sea that surrounds the state, the coastal roads are the most attractive, for at least there's a view of something other than orange groves or scrub oak. Long before these current major highways worked their way up and down the state, I used to make the drive back and forth on two-lane blue roads between Miami, where I worked, and Tallahassee, where my first wife lived, back in the late Sixties. I say my first wife; she is still my wife, as I've never had another. She had made it obvious to me, back then when we first encountered each other at the university, that there was something there which I ought not resist. I came to understand what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he wrote, in ‘The Great Gatsby,' that her thoughts “concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” So that long drive was always worth the time and the distance and, after a while, I stuffed everything that I owned into that little two-seat MGB and made the drive for the final time. I obviously didn't own much, but I had found a treasure and, having uncovered it in my clumsy but determined fashion, decided to cling to it.
Hello HenryM.
Thank you for such an eloquent rendering of your feelings towards your relationship with your ‘first' wife.
It puts me in mind of the many inadequate attempts I have penned in verse over the years to try to capture how I feel about my relationship with my own spouse of 55years.
There are so many aspects to such a relationship that it seems difficult to focus upon any particular one for highlighting. So, your more generalised ‘uncovering of a treasure, which you recognised and decided to cling to', seems as good a way as any to acknowledge how you feel.
As this generalised sentiment was also one I share, my selected rhyme for your post today will be the one below, which, in the third & fourth line tries to express a similar sentiment.
Best wishes
Bill
PS: I sometimes wonder if my wife might read some of my rhymes when I'm dead, and realise that my appreciation of her was always present.
REMINDERS OF YOU.
A blade of grass, a drop of dew.
One grain upon the sand.
A precious gem, one of a few.
A diamond in my hand.
A cloud that floats way up above.
Quite uniquely completed.
Those feelings from a first-time love.
Which can never be repeated.
A drifting thought across my mind.
A long-lost friendly greeting.
All those things, one of a kind.
Indelible, strong, yet fleeting.
Experiences come and some may go.
There's those wonderful, rarefied few.
So exquisitely unique, I know.
They'll trigger fond memories of you.
B. Withers (2000)
(In: 'Contemplation' 2010)
Henry,
I never miss a day going on this site because your posts are always insightful and so well written.
