Carl
Wayne, 1943-2004.
It
was a Wednesday, the anniversary of the day Germany invaded Poland.
No doubt that was a day like any other too, a day that crept up on
you without any trumpets but left you shell-shocked. It was such a day
that our reality was changed but the heavens didn’t think to announce it
with a fanfare. He was simply there one second and then he was gone.
Time ran out so fast, and so sneakily, an intruder in the night who
steals away with everything of value.
And now I play the songs and listen to the chords and hear the voices
ringing the chimes of that the new age, as it was, and I wonder ‘how
did it become yesteryear so quickly?’ Ah, the glass is broken and
time is slipping away, running faster and faster. ‘Was it always
that way?’ Maybe it was and we didn’t notice; or maybe we did and
looked the other way.
Carl died on Wednesday. The papers say he passed away peacefully but
his passing at all is not a peaceable thing to me. It is a yobbo
treading on my fragile glass and laughing as my sand of life’s
richness is blown away on the wind. Ah, I am so glad that yobbo
doesn’t know, and I’m not going to tell him, where I keep the real
stuff. Come to think of it, he couldn’t trample it even if he knew.
The real stuff is the joy of having been there. It is something we are
united in, something in which we can never be parted. The joy of being
there is, like Carl, forever fixed in the eternal present of our
hearts.
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