I’ll continue with Shakespeare’s order of the seasons of life – at least as long as it suits me. He pictures a sighing male in love singing a ballad toward his girl’s beautiful eyebrow. It didn’t happen exactly like that for me, though there was music involved.
A sixteen-year-old senior in high school, I had several good friends who were boys but no boyfriend. That was fine with me since I had college and career goals on my mind. That is until Daddy went to a new church in view of a call to be their prospective pastor and came back with admiration for their talented young male pianist, also a senior in high school. Since Daddy had promised that I would not have to change schools in the middle of my senior year, we visited the church for him to preach on weekends until school was out.
In the course of getting acquainted with the young people in the church on these visits, it would have been wrong of me to leave out this pianist so I had a few conversations with him. My parents saw nothing unusual in this since I liked to talk, without any discrimination between boys and girls. They noticed nothing until after we moved and they began to make home visits to get to know their parishioners. Soon, Mama was laughing each time they entered the house on their return, telling me that yet another church member had managed to work into the conversation, “You know, Allen Butler is such a nice boy.”
Now, you may wonder how the entire church had noticed what had passed right over the heads of my parents. It seems Allen had a reputation of not saying much to anybody and nothing at all to girls. The fact that he had been seen talking to me on more than one occasion was more than enough for country people, who knew everybody’s business, to draw some conclusions. Their comments on his character were their way of reassuring their new pastor and his wife that this son of their community was good enough for their oldest daughter.
As it turned out, I agreed with the “nice boy” assessment of the church members. I have recounted a bit of how my college plan changed in a previous blog to be found at https://www.virginiamcgeebutler.com/blog/2021/2/26/100-well-spent.
By the time I had finished two years at the community college, the pianist had talked me into a lifetime of listening to his music! The career goal did a turn as well since I gave up the idea of going into nursing and majored in education to feed the teacher that had been inside me all the time. As for the music – those fingers aren’t quite as nimble as they were on the boy, but a good hymn tune from the piano still lifts my spirits as I cook supper.
