Whitney

I don't know why Whitney Houston's death is making me so sad.  Maybe I'm just having a down day.  Or maybe it's because I feel like she was kind of like a thread that ran through my life.  She was just a few years younger than me, and grew up about 20 minutes away from where I did.  She went to a private high school in my town, the school that two of my nieces now attend.  Her version of the National Anthem was one of the only records by a pop singer that my father ever bought.  He was a classical music snob, but he listened to her sing that song over and over, with tears in his eyes.  After she married Bobby Brown, they lived in the same town as my sister.  I would hear occasional stories about problems they were having- how the police had been to their house again because Whitney had freaked out and climbed on Bobby's car and smashed the windows with a baseball bat, things like that.  Their daughter went to school with a friend's daughter- more reports of Whitney behaving badly, showing up at school affairs with her entourage, acting like an obnoxious, attention-craving celebrity.  Once in awhile, Bobby would hang out at the restaurant where my brother worked, where he would sit at the bar and tell people his problems.

These stories made me sad, not because I was a big Whitney fan, but because I didn't want her success to destroy her.  But I always had a feeling it would.  I never bought an album of hers- that wasn't my kind of music.  I always stopped and listened when I heard her sing, though, because of the gift she had.  That's what makes me sad, I guess.  Not just that she's the latest to suffer a tragic celebrity death, but that her voice is gone.  And I'm just realizing now that all those tabloid stories of the mess her life had become were a distraction from the fact that we lost it a long time ago.