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A Concert movie that changed me
Elvis in Alabama
But a no-show at the Iron Bowl
Yesterday I kept thinking about how much I’d love to talk to my parents, to hear their voices and tell them so many things, like how they’ll soon be great-grandparents, and how well they raised us. And how much I just miss them. We all know that death is final, but sometimes it hits even harder just how final, final can be.
So after feeling this need, I finally realized that a likely cause or motivator was that yesterday was their wedding anniversary. It would have been 69 years. My mother died in 2018, my father in 2000. So they were married for 48 years. Not bad, even though there were definitely rough patches, and the last eight months of my Dad’s life were increasingly filled with dementia.
So last night my wife and I toasted them with a lovely Chardonnay, and at my wife’s request, I told stories of their meeting and then whatever random memories flooded through me. I put on an Elvis Presley album, a live recording of songs from the circle of his comeback special on NBC in 1968.
“That’s appropriate,” my wife said. “Did both of your parents like Elvis?”
“Mom loved him, and though he wasn’t Dad’s style, he did admit that Elvis was King, which from a man who loved Dixieland and Big…