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.