Let It Be

The late great Kenny Rogers once said, “You need three things in your life to be happy, you have to have someone to love, have something to do, and something to look forward to.” Great philosophy.

Never count a person out, his 1981 album, “Kenny Rogers: Through the Years,” hit number one last week on the Billboard chart. He hadn’t had a number one album since 1986. His voice sounded like someone who grew up on a gravel road. The other piece of advice he left us was, “Know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em”.

Just think as we live through one of those times in our lifetime and how unimaginable things are happening right now that we do have something to look forward to. Your age and experiences put things in perspective. “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

November 22, 1963, President Kennedy assassinated, country is on its knees. Less than three months later, February 9th, 1964, before the largest ever television audience of 73 million Americans, the Beatles perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show. After seeing the reaction of the audience, my father shook his head in disgust and my mother told us that was the way she felt when she saw Frank Sinatra. “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Yeah.”

The worst pandemic this country has ever experienced was between 1918-1919 with over a half million Americans dying. And then in less than a year in 1920, hemlines rose above the knee, The Charleston was the dance craze of the decade, and everything was jazzy and everybody was singing, “Makin’ Whoopee” until October 29, 1929.

If we could only ask someone who lived in Jasper County, Georgia in 1864 when Sherman came calling how it felt when the sound of his distant cannons was no longer distant. Within a few years, regardless of politics, war, America came back and the age of industrialization began. And the “World Turned Upside Down” was right again.

Such is life.