The Cow Mooeth (a play by Sid Wates)
the picnic flowers Crepe Myrtle
[???]
Now I live in California and long ago left the ministry. I’m an orthopedic surgeon and minister to a flock of all faiths or of none. The exact word for my charge of vocation is “demitted.”
California is a very different climate from North Carolina where I grew up and started my ministry, but there is one area slightly south of San Francisco where some of the same plants I knew way back then flourish and will forever evoke in me the bittersweet memories of my failure to become a minister, anybody’s minister. It was a comedy, fortunately a one-acter. You would know without anyone telling you that I did not see it as a comedy at the time.
I had not been invested but a few months before I was called upon to perform a number of weddings.
“There’s always a flurry around June,” Mrs. Stevenson, the church secretary, told me. “You’ll get a lot of invitations.”
I had already begun to think that a new minister was a kind of local entertainment, but it was the two weeks of parties before every wedding that surprised me.
“They want to get to know you,” Mrs. Stevenson said. “The young couple and the families, so you’re like a friend who’s marrying them.”
I must have sounded like an idiot and believe myself the more fortunate of men in my chosen vocation.
I had had some anxieties about living in a very small town with no [real restaurants? red vestments?] as a bachelor with no widowed mother or sister to keep house for me.
But I had lived there six months and only once had found myself at home with no alternative but to scramble eggs for my dinner. Even then my larder was stocked with chocolate-chip cookies and caramel cake.
Beware fudge-bearing young ladies and beware the fudge-bearing young lady who offers, indeed insists, upon teaching you to make fudge.
When the mother of Miriam Hancock appeared in my office, Mrs. Stevenson had warned me she would be coming, to talk about her daughter’s plans to be married and the desire of the family that I perform the ceremony. I was unprepared to be chained.
I was the proverbial bird chained to its perch from the first moment she held out her hand and said in the most cordial, natural way, “If any of my girls had been boys”—there was the tiniest coloring of cheek at this—“I would have so wanted to have him go into the ministry.”
I must have beamed in full appreciation of the compliment she had paid me. My spirits were lifted, and I felt positively elated.
After we had agreed on a date and a few details—Mrs. Stevenson kept a checklist for the bride and groom and a carbon copy for the mother of the bride—Mrs. Hancock rose to leave and once again extended her hand, “We’ll know one another a bit better after this is all over.”
That was the understatement of the year.
[Undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Wedding photos below via George Eastman House: 1 & 2.]
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