It was in 1958 and my mother had put me into a Roman Catholic boarding school, St.Edward's High School in Austin. I was very homesick. She found money to come and visit me. I remember that we went to the Varsity Theatre on Congress Avenue and we saw the just-released film Raintree County with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Eva Marie Saint.
My eyes were only for Marie Saint and I ignored Taylor.
In 1966, I had in Buenos Aires a Uruguayan-born girlfriend called Corina
Poore who introduced me to the music of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.
Corine had (and has) a fine voice and played (and plays) a fine guitar. I was madly
in love with this woman and her music. And she did have longish long hair. After a short relationship she went off to England to study art.
When I arrived back in Mexico City in 1967 I saw my bride to be Rosemary, for the first time leaving a school were we both taught English. I saw her from the back. She had lovely legs that were splendidly displayed in her mini-skirt and her long and straight blonde hair was divine.
For a while she would iron her hair on an ironing board. I
could not ever get enough of her face and hair. I played a lot of
Peter, Paul and Mary.
Today Sunday, March 6, 2022 at 11:04 PM it has hit me that fate (and I don’t believe in it) and free will (which I perhaps do not have) pushed me to eventually meet my Rosemary and to marry her.
In the more than one year since she died on December 9 2020, I have been listening and watching a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary on YouTube. In particular I have found the older black and white videos of them singing Blowing in the Wind and Where Have All the Flowers Gone.
I think why it is that we no longer have music like that? Is it because we all like the music of our youth? Could it be something more?
Yes.
It did finally understand when I watched this version of
Blowing in the Wind what my attraction to the group was and has been. There is
a sad look to Mary Travers’s face and her long and straight blonde hair is all
Rosemary. Rosemary had a lovely smile but she also had a sad expression that somehow our eldest daughter Alexandra inherited.
Yes, free will does not exist (except with inanimate objects
like computers, cell phones and digital cameras that do as they please). But
fate, must, unless meeting up with Rosemary was just a plain example
that stuff happens with no logical explanation and that coincidence happens more often than not.
And here a 2004 re-mastered Where Have All the Flowers Gone
My mentor and friend Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S.C explained free will like this.
He told us that a supreme being was on the top of a mountain and looking down on a hairpin curve. Two cars were coming from opposite directions. Would they crash? Or would they not? Could the supreme being stop them? Did the supreme being know what was going to happen? Brother Edwin told us that the supreme being knew the answers to all those questiong and that by not doing anything that was free will.
Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S.C. Free Will & Resistentialism
