It occurred to me that if anyone accesses this
blog on Christmas day, it means you are really desperate for something to do. And
I’m already too full of mincemeat pie to write something new, but I can do a
repeat from 12-25-10.
It’s Christmas, almost,
and I miss my friend, Phyllis, for it was at Christmas time that I first met
her, when we were both ten years old. I miss her especially when I hear “I
Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”
My family had moved from
the working-class near-east side of Indianapolis to the country near Oakland
City in March. Phyllis and I were both in fifth grade, but I didn’t meet her
until Christmas time. I was in 5-A, kids who started school in January, and she
was 5-B, kids who started in Sept. She lived in town and I rode a school bus.
And we went to different churches.
I went to Forsythe, an
open-country Methodist church. Phyllis’ father, Jimmy Graham, was the pastor at
Oak Grove General Baptist Church, a mile down the gravel road from Forsythe, as
well as attending Oakland City College. Those churches held different
theologies, but we shared a common culture, and so we also shared a common VBS
and Christmas program. It was at that shared Christmas program in 1947 that I
met Phyllis.
After the little children
had “said their pieces,” and the older ones had sung a carol in a rag-tag
choir, there was an excited stirring, especially among the Methodists, who were
not used to excitement in church, at least not of the Baptist kind. Everyone
looked to the back of the church. Striding confidently forward, holding an
accordion almost as large as she, came this skinny little girl. She stepped up
onto the platform, worked the bellows, and began to sing, with the deepest,
fullest voice I had ever heard. Her song was “I Heard the Bells on Christmas
Day,” Longfellow’s 1863 poem, written in the midst of the Civil War, later set
to John Calkin’s music.
I had never before heard a
song like that, or a voice like that. It seemed like I was in the presence of
royalty, or perhaps twelve-year old Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet,” or
Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” [1]
I say that I met Phyllis
then, but she didn’t meet me. Because of different home rooms and buses and
churches, we didn’t really meet until we were freshmen in high school. We met
then because I was in the girls’ biology class.
I was a mid-year student,
and worked on the school newspaper and sang in the choir. In a small school,
with limited class offerings, that meant a confused class schedule. As a
freshman, I had the second semester of “Commercial Arithmetic,” without benefit
of the first semester, with mostly junior girls, and since I was otherwise
scheduled during the boys’ biology class, I was placed in the girls’ class,
taught by Iva Jane McCrary, the “old maid” home ec teacher. Phyllis and I sat
across a big sewing table from each other. Phyllis was quite pretty and very
smart, which meant that I could look at her or her test paper and expect
erudition in either case.
The high point of freshman
biology was learning about “human reproduction,” which took two whole days.
When those two days came, though, Sammy Kell and I, Sammy being the only other
boy with a class schedule as eccentric as mine, were sent off to sit in the
principal’s outer office during biology class, since we did not have the right
mind-set, or equipment, presumably, to learn about human reproduction with the
girls.
When I returned to class,
I asked Phyllis about what I had missed. “I think you’ll still be able to have
children,” she said.
In our sophomore year,
Phyllis’ father graduated from college and took a church in Tennessee. I did
not see her again until I was the new Methodist campus minister at Indiana
State University and Rose Polytechnic in Terre Haute, just graduated from
Garrett Theological Seminary, and she was a new professor of mathematics at
Indiana State, having just received a PhD from Indiana University. Typically of
Phyllis, she had done graduate work in math because she felt it was her weakest
subject, thus the one in which she needed extra work to be a truly educated
person.
Phyllis was pleased that I
had indeed been able to have children, two darling little girls. She became a
member of our family, a special aunt to Mary Beth and Katie, sharing meals and
picnics and friends.
The Wesley Foundation did
not have its own worship services, and as the new campus minister, I got to
preach only once a semester at Centenary Church. By the time those rare Sundays
came around, I had a lot of ideas and passion stored up. Those were Sundays
when Phyllis became a Methodist. After one of those sermons, she waited until
everyone else had filed past me at the door, then reached up and grabbed me by
the top of my robe and pulled me down to her face and said, “You don’t know it
yet, but when you’re in that pulpit, you’re something special. People will
believe what you say just because of the way you say it. So you make damn sure
you say the truth.”
So, in memory of my
friend, whom I miss especially at Christmas time, I will say the truth, in the
words of William Wadsworth Longfellow:
Then pealed the bells more
loud and deep:
‘God is not dead nor doth
he sleep.’
The wrong shall fail, the right
prevail
With peace on earth good
will to men.’
May the peace of God be
with you,
John Robert McFarland
[1] I had a special crush
on Margaret O’Brien because I had seen a photo of her holding the same
fifth-grader reader I used at Lucretia Mott Public School # 3 in Indianapolis.
Interestingly, at least to me, Margaret shared a birthday with the late Joe
Frazier, the baritone of the Chad Mitchell Trio and Episcopal vicar in Big Bear
Lake, CA. Each was 19 days further advanced in decrepitude than I.
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