FLOWERS FOR PAULA--THE CLASS OF ’55 [T, 1-19-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

FLOWERS FOR PAULA--THE CLASS OF ’55      [T, 1-19-21]

The series just ended, about my classmate, Paula, at our final class reunion, was hard to write. But I needed to write it, for myself, to try to make sense of the situation. I didn’t really make much headway.

I love Paula. I love all the members of that class. Along with Forsythe Church during the same years, they formed me into who I am. More than any group other than my family, they were my world. It was from them that I learned how to be a citizen of that small world, our Oakland City class, and, later, of the whole world. So it was hard to write about Paula’s failings as a world citizen, especially regarding black people and poor people. I prefer to remember her “the way we were,” back in the day.

My Oakland City world started when I was 6 weeks into the first semester of 5^th Grade, just turned ten years old. We had moved from the working-class inner city of Indianapolis, where I attended Lucretia Mott PS # 3, just off busy Washington St, which doubled as US Highway 40, “The National Road.” Suddenly I was on a little hardscrabble farm on a gravel road, a long way from the city world in which I had lived up to then. It was a new and different and scary world.

I suppose my mother must have called Embrey Green, the principal of the grade school, to tell him I would be getting off of Jimmy Bigham’s school bus that day, my first day in my new school. I don’t remember him meeting the bus, but I do remember him taking me through the halls and up the stairs. As we neared May Mason’s fifth grade classroom, we ran into Jarvis Reed, the quintessential jolly fat kid who never met a stranger. Surely the best thing that could have happened to me that day.

Jarvis was in my class, and he acted like having a new kid in the class was better than ice cream. He took me into our room, introduced me to everyone with a big smile. “Look, we have a new kid in our class. This is John. He says his father had Mrs. Mason for a teacher back a long time ago.” Mrs. Mason frowned, like she remembered my father.

Jarvis and I were never close, in the sense of running around together, but he always acted like he was responsible for me being in the class, for he had discovered me before the others. He acted like he was proud of that. He came to our wedding. As soon as Helen and I entered the reunion venue every five years, he made a beeline for me, with five-years-worth of newspaper clippings about my exploits to give me, even that final sixty-year reunion, hobbling toward me on a walker, that same smile on his face that he had the first time I saw him.

Jarvis led the way, but everyone in that class made me feel accepted, at a time when I was excruciatingly aware of my poverty and outsider status. Mike and Bob and James and Russell and Mina Ann and Donna and Marietta and… all the others. They trusted me. They elected me class president three times. [1] They asked me to be the speaker at the reunions, even though a speaker was hardly necessary. They had elected me Most Likely to Succeed, and were proud that I had done so, at least in their eyes.

So many times in my life, when I was tempted to cut corners, take the easy way, avoid the hard decisions, fall for the glib lines, I looked up and saw the waiting faces of my classmates, smiling at me, expecting me to do the right thing. So when Jim said we should send flowers, even though we weren’t sure there would be a funeral, I sent the money for them.

John Robert McFarland

1] They nominated me for a fourth term. I asked them to elect someone else, since I would be busy as editor of Oak Barks, the school newspaper, in preparation for my career as a newspaperman. That was a good move for an unanticipated reason: I dropped out midway through that last year. But that’s a different story. Also, they elected Mike Dickey, who was a better president than I was.