Time Was Truth Was Love Was by Fred Schelling

Time Was Truth Was Love Was
by
Fred Schelling

Time was when someone said I love you, it meant, well, that that someone loved you, but these days, in these latter times so to speak, when truth can be hard to find and might very well be like that bird on a wire you saw out of the corner of your eye, a bird that might not have been an actual bird but only an illusion, an illusion that was about to fly off in a completely unexpected direction, and not only that but these days "those dirty liars" you hear so much about might very well be the ones actually telling the real truth, so I must tell you I appreciate what you said, but to tell you the truth, I took it with a grain of salt, which in case you haven't ever heard that old grain of salt saying before, it refers to skepticism, and if you're like me you would probably get to wondering where a saying like that would come from, and then you would look it up and find out nobody knows for sure where it came from, but everybody agrees it goes way back, so far back some think it goes all the way back to somebody named Pliny in 77 A.D who declared it to be an antidote to poison which might be true (that he said it, not that it is an antidote), or it could be that the ancient Romans just made the saying up based on the Latin phrase cum grano salis which I don't believe at all, or it could simply be from the modern notion that food tastes better with a little salt on it which probably isn't where the saying came from because that explanation doesn't have anything to do with skepticism, and besides, that explanation sounded so mundane to me I decided to take the time to really research it, and I eventually found out the truth is it actually goes back to the middle ages which we know is true because it appeared in an English book from that time named The Canterbury Tales that was supposedly written by a guy named Chaucer, specifically in The Cook's Tale when the cook says,

Up-on a day, whan he his paper soghte,
Of a proverbe that seith this same word,
'Wel bet is roten appel out of hord
Than that it rotie al the remenaunt,
So fareth it be helpeth were he addeth
The smalleth degree of salt,

but you might say that doesn't have anything to do with skepticism either, but you know how things get changed and distorted over time, like in that kid's game where everybody gets in a circle and you whisper a saying into your neighbor's ear and by the time it gets back around to you it's completely changed, so I've decided to go with the Chaucer version which of course doesn't really matter because that's not what I was trying to say at all which now that I think about it shows that my mind works a lot like that kid's game, but I have to admit that I do often catch myself thinking, ah, those were the days, a time when you could count on what someone said to you, a time when you didn't have to take it with a grain of salt. Oh, and by the way, I love you too. Honestly.

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