There is a Picture I Still Keep

There is a song by Toby Keith called "We Were In Love". It is a very nice song, I don't know if he wrote it or not, but he sings it really well. There is one line in it that never fails to make me "tear up". "I can still see you when I sleep; there is a picture I still keep..." Those words: There is a picture I still keep.



It reminds me of a very kind, gentle, loving man, my father. I remember something he did for my mother once that touched me deeply. You see, my mother was and is a very pretty woman. And although she is also witty and smart and accomplished, she grew up being recognized for her "prettiness". She was a cheerleader, a "dish", a "looker", so she could hardly help feeling that her main reason for being valued was being pretty.

When she was about the age I am now, early 50's, she began to feel she was losing her looks, and though she didn't make a big deal of it, my father, being the sensitive man that he was, could tell it was bothering her. So one day, when I was there, and she was in the kitchen within hearing distance, he started talking to me. He said, "Ann, I think your mother thinks she isn't attractive to me anymore. But you know, she couldn't be more wrong. Because you see, when I look at her, this is what I see." And he pulled out his wallet and showed me a dog-eared old photograph of Mother when she was twenty-two years old, with the sun on her face and a dazzling smile.  That was what he saw when he looked at her. His heart looked beyond the age in her eyes, and the wrinkles, and the thicker waistline and saw that beautiful young girl that he had married.
She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen and looked at him with such love, I had to look away. It was their moment alone.


When he died, and we were going through his things, we looked in his wallet and there was that picture...still.

                                                  There is a picture I still keep..

Here is the link to the song...

We Were In Love