The singer/songwriter Benard Ighner (1945-2017) wrote a song called “Everything Must Change,” which was featured on Quincy Jones’ 1974 album, “Body Heat.” I remember hearing Ighner’s voice that year, when my first child was 2 years old, and I sang the song early and often to the two women of my new family. But, as the song sings, “nothing and no one goes unchanged.”
When I went to St. Louis Missouri to join the advertising department from which I had been disconnected when L.S. Ayres closed, I found that much of the artwork that I had produced on a drawing board was being crafted on a computer. I told my first bride about that, and she cried out, “Oh! That must be so sad for you.” We were together during my early artistic endeavors, and she watched my efforts at the drafting table and later listened to the tap, slap, and ding! of my manual typewriter as I labored over my stories, poems, and university schoolwork. But when she bemoaned the loss of my pencils and pens to the mysteries of the screen, I told her that the new things that I was encountering were exciting to me. I loved the change, for after all, “Everything must change/ Nothing stays the same…”
My mother would have been 101 years old in November of 2024 and she was always one to embrace change. She had a desktop computer (thanks to my brother, the computer repairperson) and when I would take my two youngest children to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania to visit her, my 8-year-old son would go into her bedroom and get on the device; Grammy Ike was fond of talking to her children and grandchildren about the social media phenomenon that she called “FacePlace.” She recognized that “The young become the old/ And mysteries do unfold…” When she decided to change her life of dependence on the state (welfare) and become a nurse, she practiced typing on a piece of cardboard with the keys written on it, since we had no typewriter. That changed when her oldest son got a job and bought one for her. My mother also told me that my sister had changed enough to need a brassiere, “‘cause that’s the way of time,” and I purchased one for her.
When I managed a small loan branch office in Madera California, I decided to purchase my dream car, a 1976 Triumph TR6. My bride assented to the purchase. The car had a feature that was a change from the 4-speed standard shift that powered my VW Rabbit: Once you had sped through the 4 gears, you could flip a switch to go into electric overdrive. When I see cars with a “push to start” feature, I imagine that my electric overdrive was an early indicator of that change from keyed ignitions.
We are on the cusp of some great changes with the coming of the new year, and I feel (only slightly) guilty about blowing past Thanksgiving and the December celebrations and leaping onto the back of 2025, but change is coming, and we must all recognize the inevitability of that. “Winter turns to Spring/ A wounded heart will heal…” But even with the danger of global warming, there is this refrain from Ighner’s song that reminds us that “There are not many things in life/ You can be sure of, except…”
“Rain comes from the clouds/ Sun lights up the sky/ And hummingbirds do fly…”
Despite all the changes in life, we still have that, and for me, the closing to the song still applies:
“… music makes me cry.”
cjon3acd@att.net