Farewell Guiding Light

Yes, 'tis true I have watched this show since I was a teenager and now at age....., well let's just say I've known some of these folks longer than I've known my kids and my oldest is 47!!!!!!!!!!!!

I always watched just enought to basically know pretty much what was happening and since my retirement two years ago, have not kept up with it on a daily or even weekly basis until I heard a couple of months ago the series was ending. And have watched every day for the past week and all the people have become.................normal.

No extra marital affairs, no deaths that people came back from, no trashiness, divorce, or scandals. No one has been arrested or diagnosed with an incurable illness needing a transplant. That was last week.

Pretty dull right? Nope, really it has been nice. Like visiting people you really know and care for and you've come to a family reunion, everyone is on their best behavior and life in Springfield has come full circle. All loose ends were neatly sewn up. Sweet farewells with just enough vagueness to let us make up our own happy endings for their now normal lives. But this is TV. Make-believe. A soap. A show. Not reality.

So long Josh, Reva, Buzz, Lillian, Vanessa, Billy, Phillip,Beth, Jonathan, Sarah, Shane, Daisy, Rick, Mindy, Blake, Frank,Michelle, Danny, Ed, Holly, Alex,Fletcher, Malek, Dinah,and others who I cannot now remember their names and so many more of the next two generations I never got to know or love. They were all there. But where were Eve and Ben whom I had forgotten about until Shari reminded me that when Eve and Ben were married I had let her and Lori stay home from school to watch when they were teenagers!

Alan's ashes had poignantly been scattered yesterday, so they somehow made us forget what a rotten dirty scoundrel he had always been and everyone loved him dearly in death.Guess he had indeed redeemed himself with being able to save Phillip's life last week.

And the show ends with a virtual fast forward to one year from today with everyone there in Springfield coming back home and catching up at the park for goodbyes. Amid announcements of new loves, new babies, new careers and babies suddenly much older than they were yesterday but the constant of the show of course was Joshua Lewis and Reva Shane meeting up as planned at the ole Light House and pledging once again for the umteenth thousandth time their undying and eternal love and riding off in the sunset in an old Ford hooptie belonging to the late H.B. And for once I believed them when they said "I'll love you forever".

Guiding Light, you had me from Hello.