02/15/09
At Vespers I was randomly seated beside an older woman in our huge university amphitorium. While we were waiting for the ‘show’ to start, the woman started an interesting conversation with me.
“Are you a dorm student?” she asked with wide, kind eyes.
“Yes. I live in Sunday.”
“Ah! Nell Sunday! I lived there for 2 years!”
“When you were a student?” I prodded.
“Yes. I had the room that had 6 windows, right in the middle of the hall on third floor.”
“I’m on third floor!”
She continued,“Nobody wanted that room because the middle room had to answer the one phone on the hall.”
“Wait, there was only one phone? For the entire hall?”
“Yep.”
“So I imagine that was crazy with boys calling girls all the time.”
“Oh, no! Boys never called the girls! That phone was just for calling home! No, boys would send us notes through note mail.”
“Note mail? Like the P.O. box?”
“No, note mail.”
“Oh, like night mail! Wow, nobody sends notes anymore. Generally people send candy and dating invitations.”
“My {the name of the old gentleman seated next to her} wrote me a note every day.”
“Aw, that’s really sweet. How did you two meet?”
“Dining Common. Back then we had required seats in the Dining Common and we were served family style. Then when dating couples would walk back from the dining common they would follow the date line.”
“The date line?”
She nodded knowingly, “Or they called it the snail trail. Back in that day couples weren’t allowed to loiter after dinner. The boys were to walk their dates back to their dorms and then say goodbye. So dating couples would walk that treck real slow.”
I never caught the woman’s name.
Right after the show ended and I bidded the woman adieu, I ran to Nell Sunday where I was supposed to wait for my extension ride to a Nursing home.
I went with my friend Katrina, who confessed she was nervous because she worried that people down south didn’t like people with brown skin and wouldn’t like her, a native of Guam, in the nursing home. The minute we walked in, I wanted to laugh, because a huge white woman in a white chair right in front of the door was holding a black baby doll. As we proceeded through the crummy, run-down nursing home, I saw Katrina’s eyes brighten as she saw that most of the nurse’s were African American.
A little service of people collected in the dining room of the Nursing Home and we were almost immediately greeted by a woman who insisted ‘we girls’ give her a big hug. I was the second to hug the woman, which meant that when the hug broke off Katrina had moved on, but I asked her what her name was. She gave me a long drawn out name and from that I remember only ‘Julie’. She was such a character. Not very old. “Guess how old I am?” she was excited to ask.
“41,” I teased.
“Hah. I wish. 57.”
Really quite young for a nursing home. I learned later that she had been abused by her husband who pushed her down the stairs and gave her brain damage.
As we sang, she leaned over and solemnly said, “You and I, we make quite a team.”
Then, from her messy little compartment underneath her walker, she pulled out a small ziploc bag of candy and said, “Here.”
“Did you want me to open it for you?”
“Naw it’s fer you, hun.”
She had a southern accent.
The preacher got up, a young seminary guy full of wind and pomp, and began to preach on the role of the Church. I looked around at the drooling faces sagging in every possible way – all shadows of the past – and wanted to laugh that the sermon was about Peter and the role of the Church.
But Julie didn’t seem to mind. She raised her hand to share with us a poem about Heaven being a beautiful place that she was going to some day. She ended her “free verse poem” with some comment about the wonderful Bob Jones University students. The seminary leaders of the extension squirmed before her simple words, looking uncomfortable and impatient, like little boys getting scolded.
As the sermon progressed, she got out her pictures and showed me a picture of her and a startlingly old woman.
“This,” she pointed with delight, “Is my roommate!” I had a sudden picture of me and my roommates and found irony in her joy over a 96 year old woman and my attitude toward my young roommates. “Here, you can keep this picture.”
My collection of things from her was beginning to grow.
She leaned over half-way through the sermon and asked me, “Are you datin a boy?”
I laughed, “Nope, I’m as single as they come.”
“Whal, I have me a man. His name is Marvin. He’d be here but he’s upstairs because his left side is paralyzed. But he told me the other day that he loves me.” She held my hand as she said this and I didn’t really mind.
“It’s nice to be loved,” I added impartially.
“You pray for me and Marvin and I’ll pray that you will find yourself a man.”
All of this, said so solemnly, so slowly, with that sweet southern drawl. And yet, she had fire in her. She had a desire to live and I heard it in her voice when she told me she was divorcing her husband.
But then she was sweet again when she held up her Bible and said that some students of BJU had gotten together to get that for her and she never forgot it. I noticed it didn’t seemed to be used much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she used another Bible for reading since the print in that one was so small.
“I’ll bring my glasses next time,” she told me reassuringly.
As we left, Katrina nudged me and whispered, “You coming back?”
“Yeah, if you are.”
“We have to! Did you hear that woman’s poem?? Oh, they need us!” Her blind enthusiasm made me smirk and our ride home was much more animated because there was actually something to discuss that we all had in common.Indeed, the ride home is always more animated.
