Next Verse

There are days that collapse in a tired sigh more than coming to the end of a day’s worth of activities.  Our day’s sign left Winnie and I slumped into the couch, not snuggled but close enough to touch.  We wound down the final day of our forty-seventh year of marriage. 

The television flickered forth a black and white retrospective film.  Peter, Paul & Mary’s harmonies and musical story telling rang out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  1963.  Throngs of thousands who gathered in the March on Washington joined with the trio in singing, “How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?...The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind...”  Winnie took my hand.  No words were said; none were needed.  Martin Luther King Jr. was about to tell those gathered there, and the world, about a dream that lived in his heart and mind.

John Kennedy was president.  Their next song implored those gathered, “It’s the hammer of justice, it’s the bell of freedom, it’s the song about love...”  Only three months remained before JFK’s motorcade in Dallas.  It would be almost a year until Winnie and I would first meet.  Nearly five years before we would wed but these were our times.  Transfixed by the music and decades old newsreels, our hands interlaced finger to finger, palm to palm.

For nearly all of the time we dated, I was a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia and Winnie was working for International Harvester in Kansas City.  Distance dating meant seeing each other on some weekends (when I was able to hitchhike home) augmented by long distance calls, three minutes for six quarters.

During the years we dated, the Beatles captured the limelight with massive crowds, screaming fans, and pop culture idolatry.  Peter, Paul and Mary sang to lesser crowds but to every conscience about the protests, the turmoil and the troubles between generations, genders, nationalities and races.  In those five short years, King, Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy would also die at the hands of assassins.  Within a couple of weeks of our first date, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were murdered because they were helping black people register to vote in Mississippi.

Two months before our wedding, I was driving home from college and attempting to get to Winnie’s parents’ house.  Unaware that Marshall Law had been instituted through a wide swath of Kansas City, my neck hairs were standing on end in the eerie silence of streets without cars, porches without people and sidewalks without pedestrians.  I was stopped at multiple check points, ID was checked, and I was given strict instructions about the limits of my movements.  In those days long before cell phones or social media, I searched to find a pay-phone but most businesses were closed and I was fearful about stopping. 

So I kept moving.  From road block to road block, I inched my way to Winnie while hearing sketchy radio reports about riots near city hall.  The crowds accompanied by looters and vandals were already spreading through downtown and beyond.  The five days since Martin Luther King Jr. had been slain had only served to infect the wounds inflicted in the racial divide.

The retrospective detoured from the group’s protest songs to tell the story of Paul Stukey’s “Wedding Song” that he wrote for Peter Yarrow’s marriage.  Our clasping hands clasped a touch tighter.  Though the song wasn’t written until a year after our wedding, more than any other song, this one reminds me of the meaning of joining together.  Something about the staccato tragedies seen in the decade caused all events to be interlaced, melded into a singular memory.  While our wedding day certainly stands out for us, the day was memorable for reasons far more somber than the bliss of first night beginnings.

During the last few months of college, I had joined the thousands of other college kids across the nation to support Robert Kennedy for president.  Activism wasn’t in my DNA but I believed he could lead us to do the right things.  So I worked with others distributing flyers, buttons and stickers.  On the smallest of scales, we did what we could to help his campaign. 

Two months after the Kansas City riots and two days before our wedding day, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem ended Bobby Kennedy’s life.  As Bobby died so did hope, at least for a time.  His funeral dominated the news and every television broadcast.  No matter how joyous our wedding day had been, when we were finally alone, we could not shut out the news nor the sadness.

There wasn’t a song that managed to capture how we felt during those days.  Even the gentle but pointed wisdom of Peter, Paul & Mary was silenced for a time.  Our nation was stunned.  Evil had triumphed.  It would take another three years until Don McLean would release American Pie with lyrics that came close to telling of the loss in our hearts when he sang about “...the day the music died.”

As the documentary wound down and the plea for donations to public television took over, we shared one final hand squeeze.  We knew to put away long ago memories.  Out of that time of trial and turmoil, we began writing our own song.  On this night we knew that tomorrow would begin the writing of our forty-eighth verse.  No more words were said; none were needed.

--td