The simple Life.☀️

First time I heard American Country and Western music is forever etched in my deepest heart, I was blown away. George Jones, Marty Robbins, Don Williams, Dolly Parton, to name but a few. A neighbour recorded some songs on a tape cassette for us and another world opened up right before my eyes. 

BBC radio had a C&W program every Thursday night, which so enthralled me that I would spend most of the time on tenterhooks. Either expecting the program to end any minute, or ecstatic that the song playing was not the final one.

At eighteen years of age I moved away from home to work in Dublin. Whenever a C&W ballad would play in a store where I browsed (no money to purchase stuff!), I would remain, totally absorbed for the duration of the song, scared of missing one second of the beautiful treat that it was. No way of knowing when the next time might be, instant gratification still far off in the distant future. 

In those days, we really did know the value of everything and the price of nothing. Material wealth does little good for our world in my humble opinion.

In my retrospective gaze, summers were sunnier, people were kinder, life definitely simpler. ‘Waiting’ for stuff was not always pleasant but what an education in ‘real living’. Boredom a foreign concept, we accepted our lot, it was all we knew, the way things were. 

Perhaps as we get older the bad does sink to the bottom and only happiness and good float up, but for the most part I recall a wonderful time of simplicity, engendering us with life skills that never grow old. 

Thankyou George Jones, Marty Robbin, Don Williams and many others. May God reward you for the many happy hours you graced our lives with.

 ‘Celebrity’ is a tag pinned to many jackets these days, to be one requires little effort, ‘Heroes’ are different though. Made of sterner stuff, they endure, travelling far and wide brightening folks lives, even as far away as Kerry, Ireland.

‘Who’s gonna fill their shoes, Who’s gonna stand that tall’.  (George Jones)

You and me. That’s who!! In the way and how we live each day of our lives with God’s amazing Grace.