You Were Always On My Mind...You Were Always On My Mind: Thank you, and sleep in peace, Wayne Carson...

Four nights ago for some reason I still cannot quite fathom, the title and recurring refrain of this inescapable song of yesteryear, its haunting, brooding melody and simple yet oh so profound lyrics kept returning to my mind and conscious awareness... So recurring were the tuneful words of the song's chorus that I sought eagerly among my 385-odd record collection to uncover the singer and/or particular LP containing it, but all to no avail...though it seemed to me the likes of Frank Sinatra or Burt Bacharach might have brought it to fame (and fortune)... Little was I to know that only days later was its (to me, anyhow, never known) writer to leave this life...but that eerie reality came home to me this morning upon BBC News, where they mentioned none other than Wayne Carson, and a couple of other songs he'd composed, of which only one (or the three) I recollected at all, but not as anything great. And then the penny dropped (as I recalled my weird experience Saturday night, as 'You were always on my mind' was at last cited...and its composer...who just so happened (and happens) to share a surname which means and has meant an awful lot to me...shared by a lady who might have meant an awful lot more to me if I hadn't let nerves and fear - those many (almost 22-odd) years ago in the US of A - consume me. But thank God and praise the Lord for their fellow namesake Ben Carson, whose impeccable credentials - of character - place him head and shoulders, heart and soul, above and beyond any of his various and sundry Republican party rivals for the presidential nomination in 2016...not least of all the Self-Trumpeteer himself, a 'man' (if he ain't rather a mouse, to adopt the old adage) who has had the audacity, some would say the sheer nerve, to 'call out' and seek to cut down someone (Senator John McCain of Arizona) who had the ill-fortune to be captured in Korea, or was it Vietnam, and undergo torture as a prisoner of war for five long and rather miserable years...decrying and disparaging his status as a war hero, when said Trump himself epitomized sheer cowardice in the same, seeking (and obviously wildly succeeding) in five times apparently evading the draft, a fellow who didn't even have the courage of his convictions - as my own Dad certainly did, and suffered in consequence - to go to prison (or the equivalent in a labour camp and/or army barracks) for however long, because he happened - in The Don's case, it would seem quite evidently, not, to suffer whatever might befall him for being a man of integrity, a man of principle... So rest in peace Wayne, go well Ben, and Elizabeth, all I can say with the immense benefit which hindsight ever provides, is 'You've been [oftentimes] on my mind'...and in my heart...