The Queen is Dead, God Save England

I’ll try not to step on anyone’s toes here, because I have some very dear and close friends who are English and I am well aware that Queen Elizabeth was queen of the entire British Empire. But I speak for England.

As an11 year old, then Princess Elizabeth had watched as her father, King George VI, was crowned in an elaborate ceremony. No doubt, along with an immense sense of pride, she felt had pretty much a lifetime to live before any such load would fall on her slender shoulders. Yet a mere sixteen years later, in 1952, King George died quietly in his sleep and she became queen at the tender age of twenty-seven.

Timing, in the lives of both queens and commoners, is worryingly unpredictable.

I remember the pomp and circumstance of that event in the British Monarchy as a young man ten years her junior. Somehow I connect that grand event with my own far less grand circumstances of the moment, polishing my first car, a 1948 Chrysler convertible. Isn’t it amazing that two such diverse heart…