DO CALL HER SHIRLEY [F, 9-2-22]

 

“Wow!” Uncle Harvey said. “You say that girl lives across the alley behind you? What a deal. She’s a knockout!”

Well, yes, although I had seen her only a couple of times before, and then she was just in jeans and a blouse, in Opal’s backyard. She looked like all the girls at IU. When Uncle Harvey and I encountered her on the sidewalk in downtown Evansville, she was dressed in the standard secretary garb of the day—skin tight sweater and skirt, and four-inch heels, with hair style and makeup to match. Shirley was definitely a knockout.

In the house across the alley from the Methodist parsonage in Chrisney, Indiana, though, she was one of a line of girls “who got into trouble,” Thinking back on it now, I suspect that although they were the ones who had to be taken out of their homes and given to Opal to care for, the girls were not the source of the trouble. Whatever, they needed somewhere to go, and, one after another, Opal took them in.

I was nineteen, a college sophomore, an accidental preacher on the Chrisney circuit, living in the parsonage from Friday evening, when I drove the 100 miles from Bloomington to Chrisney, and spent the weekends in the parsonage, with only a metal folding chair and a thin mattress on a metal springs camp bed for my furniture, before preaching at the three churches on the circuit on Sunday morning, then driving back to IU on Sunday afternoon. 

Uncle Harvey was the husband of my father’s only sister, Helen. He was VP of Southern Indiana Gas & Electric, having worked his way up from the guy just out of school who shoveled coal into the boiler. He was complimentary about my preaching efforts. And he recognized a pretty girl when he saw one; he had secretaries in his office who dressed like Shirley.

I was intrigued by Shirley already, of course, just because she was female and within a hundred-mile radius. My friends and relatives had quite different interpretations of what pretty girls meant for me. My dorm buddies were like, “Oh, no, Preacher John, you’ll never get to have sex.” My older relatives and church-going neighbors were like, “Now you need to find a wife right away…” They didn’t add, “…or else you’ll never get to have sex,” but that’s what they meant. “Better to marry than burn,” as the Apostle, Paul, said. [I Corinthians 7]

I had been in the ministry only 6 weeks, but apparently I was supposed to be looking for a wife already. When my grandson was about five or six years old, he told his mother what was necessary for him when he married: “She has to be pretty, and she needs to know how to cook.” He’s definitely my grandson, except I never worried much about the cooking.

I assessed every girl by the rule of whether she would be a good preacher’s wife, meaning, “Is she pretty?” Shirley certainly would have been okay.

But I was “stolen” from Chrisney, according to the Evansville District Superintendent, Dallas Browning, by Bloomington DS, FT Johnson, to serve the Solsberry Circuit, 85 miles closer to my dorm. So I never got around to asking Shirley if she had any other attributes for being a wife, beyond being pretty.

Thirty-five years later, though, in my first and only visit back to Chrisney, I asked Catherine Adams, perceptive church lady and my mentor during my brief career there, about Shirley.

“You know,” she said, “Opal took care of so many girls through the years. I can’t remember them all. But I do remember Shirley, because she’s the one, many years later, when Opal got sick, who came back to take care of her.”

John Robert McFarland

The title is a take-off on the movie, “Airplane!” where, when one of the male characters says to another, “Surely you can’t be serious…” the retort is “Don’t call me Shirley.”