by Randy Reynolds
Dora Mae Wells heard her 16 year old granddaughter's boyfriend (me) on the radio only once. Mistakenly assuming that I, the son of a preacher, was going to do a religious show--the only kind she ever listened to--she heard me spinning records and reading news, weather, and live commercials. She endured my jokes and my barely disguised on-air messages to Sherry. Finally, impatient to hear the gospel, she looked around at the rest of the family in the sitting room and said, "Well, when's he gonna sang?"
But I was just a deejay and there would be no singing from me that day in the fall of 1966 nor ever. She figured out that I was not going to become the preacher she'd hoped that I would be, but she was happy that her oh-so-young granddaughter was happy with me.
A few weeks later, shortly before Christmas, 1966, Dora Mae's large family gathered around her deathbed in the Bogalusa, Louisiana, hospital and tried to understand the little ditty she was singing over and over. It was, "Sherry's gettin' mar-ried. Sherry's gettin' mar-ried. Sherry's gettin' mar-ried." She left this world with those words on her lips.
Now we're older than Dora Mae was when she died and we're celebrating Christmas Eve alone--well, as alone as you can get in a candlelit room decorated with dozens of angel what-nots, statuettes, carvings and pictures. (Sherry desperately believes in angels.) In the flicker of the candles as the angels listen silently, we're talking about our 45 Christmases together--especially the first one when her grandmother sang us her blessings as she went to her reward.
Someday we'll put together our whole story, the bad with the good, but tonight as we reminisce, the things that have us laughing (and feeling mushy) are the following few memories that have been posted on this blog from time to time.
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1. The day we met: I knew her name. I knew her parents. I knew the boys she had dated. But I had never spoken directly to her before that day, that day she stood there, glowing, in the middle of the yard, with that hair just the color of the hair I always dreamed about whenever I dreamed of girls, and her clothing, modest though it was here at church camp, still not modest enough to obscure her allure.
2. The night we got engaged: We leaned against an oak felled by Hurricane Betsy and I said, "Will you marry me?" And she said, "Me? You want me?" She made me tell her twice and then she said, "Okay!" And it started raining and we ran for the Volkswagen and turned on the radio to hear the Lovin' Spoonful singing "Rain On The Roof." We thought it was a sign. Of course, when you're in love, everything's a sign.
