Classes resumed after Christmas at a furious pace. The professors piled on the assignments making up for lost time. I was struggling in botany and hated it. There didn’t seem to be enough time to get it all done, not with working three hours each day, and I had no choice about that.
Looking back, it seems that my work at the infirmary helped pay for my meals, because I only received a small check once or twice a semester. So, if I received a dollar or two in the mail, which I did from time to time, it was needed and welcomed. For a brief time, I found another parttime job typing for an accountant there just to have some spending money, but that only added to the frustration of not enough time to study. Two jobs and 18 hours was altogether too much and overwhelming.
The occasional outings with the Baptist Student Union were good for me, and I tried to reserve the time for them. I loved going to the pediatric floor at the hospital where the children always made me laugh. Visiting with the women prisoners at the jail was a heartbreaking experience, listening to the stories of their lives and what they had experienced. I had nothing to compare to it, but I listened and hugged them. Somehow, that seemed to help and they welcomed us back each week. My favorite trip was probably to the nursing homes. Never having really known my grandparents, I had a tendency to adopt anyone older than 75. I loved them all, and they were so excited each week when we came for our visit.
The weeks had tumbled quickly by and it was March already…March 16, 1964. We were having a blowing rain storm…the kind that turns your umbrella inside out and wrenches it from your hands. I had managed to get across campus but was pretty soaked and freezing by the time I got to my speech lab. There, we would sit in our little carrels, wearing headphones and listening to difficult vocabulary words, repeating them quietly into microphones. I wasn’t real thrilled with this exercise or too sure of the use of it, but I complied. Sitting there in my little cubicle, I had my sweater wrapped around me, still trying to get warm.
I was quietly repeating the words I heard in the microphone, when I heard these words in my headset: “WHERE have you been?”.
“Huh?” I thought to myself…am I supposed to repeat that?!
“WHERE have you been? I haven’t seen you on campus, and I KNOW I would have seen YOU!”
“Okay, what’s going on?” I thought to myself. I looked up and there in the instructor’s booth was a very handsome young man, looking directly at me and smiling.
“Where would you like to go?” he questioned…speaking softly into his microphone. “I’ll close the lab and take you anywhere you want to go”.
Now that I’m older and a little wiser, I would probably say, “you’ve been watching too many romantic comedies”, but I was eighteen and he was cute!
Jimmy did close the lab class that afternoon, making all the students happy. By that time, the sun had come out and a beautiful rainbow made a timely appearance. We went for a long walk around the campus, and Jimmy pointed out things that had been there all along…but I’d never even noticed. A junior and a speech major, he was from the coast of Florida. He was there on a speech debate scholarship, and he was very good at it. A Methodist ministerial student at a Baptist college, his plans were to go to Duke University after graduation for his masters and to become a Methodist minister.
With a quick wit, beautiful blue eyes and a disarming smile, Jimmy was the proverbial tall, dark and handsome. He invited me to go to a play on campus that night…MacBeth. As I recall, it was a lovely evening…and the start of a close friendship.
